[Granville-Hough] 26 Aug 2009 - Miller Cemetery 1
Trustees for Granville W. Hough
gwhough at oakapple.net
Wed Dec 15 06:05:59 PST 2010
MILLER CEMETERY.
The Miller Cemetery was one of the first cemeteries ever used in
Sullivans Hollow. When my great uncle Joseph William Miller was killed
by a falling tree while clearing land in 1855, his parents, Hiram and
Susannah (Cole) Miller elected to bury him on their own land and so
established the Miller Cemetery. In the 1960 decade, I heard about the
cemetery for the first time and my brother, Harold Hough, visited it and
found it overgrown with underbrush and pine trees. He could recognize a
few graves and gave me all the names he could read from the gravestones.
As I corresponded with Miller descendants, one of the ladies who was
most interested was a Mrs. Harold Perkins, perhaps a Craft and Cole
descendant. She suggested that we collect a fund and clean up the
cemetery. We did indeed collect about $100, and that was enough to have
a cleanup day with workers who cleared away the underbrush and stood up
some fallen gravestones. I, of course, was in Army service in MA or VA
and could only contribute money. In corresponding with Mrs. Perkins or
someone else, I learned about the story of the Craft twins. I find this
story is on page 140, in Swinton Blackwell Craft Family, Smith County
Families, II, 2006, as related from John Craft, a grandson. One
seven-year old twin had died from typhoid fever, and the other twin was
peeping through a knothole in the wall to see what they were doing to
his brother. They took the dead brother away, and the second twin soon
fell back and died. They sent for the wagon which came back and they
took the other twin as well. When they got to Cohay, the creek was out
of its banks and there was no possible way to ford it and there was no
bridge. They made a raft and floated the children across, then took them
on to Miller Cemetery for burial. John Craft stated he had these two
uncles, two aunts, two cousins, and a double first cousin all buried in
Miller Cemetery. In his youth, he had played there and had counted 55
graves of Millers, Kings, Coles, Crafts, Carters, Hesters, and Walkers,
probably all related in some way to Hiram and Susannah (Cole) Miller. In
2005, I asked my nephew, Larry Hough, to give me the status of the
cemetery and he found it still overgrown with no access from the road.
(In fact, one of the things that incensed descendants was that a road
crew, in widening the road in the 1930s, had cut through some of the
graves. Perhaps some day Smith County will give more protection to its
gravesites.)
When I asked my aunt Dona Garvan where her Miller grandparents were
buried, she wrote back they were buried at Shiloh. However, as there is
no marker at either place, I would be willing to contribute to a marker
being placed for Hiram and Susannah (Cole) Miller in the Miller Cemetery.
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