[Granville-Hough] 26 Aug 2009 - Miller Cemetery

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:18:18 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: MillerCem1 - 26 Aug 2009

MILLER CEMETERY.

The Miller Cemetery was one of the first cemeteries ever used in 
SullivanÆs 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 ôSwinton Blackwell Craft Family,ö 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 1930Æs, 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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It has been graciously pointed out that "Disgraceful Killings" had two 
errors. The past tense of parole is paroled. Whore and hoar are not 
synonyms, but homonyms, same sound, different meanings.