LITTLE FLOCK -- Subdivisions have overtaken many of the 19th century graveyards in Benton County. Formerly on family farms, the burial plots are relegated to small, overgrown patches surrounded by houses and manicured lawns.
Some of these cemeteries aren't visible from roads and are almost inaccessible to the public.
Dorothy Miller, 69, of Bella Vista has been working as a volunteer to protect old cemeteries in Benton County and to document the graves of Civil War soldiers in Benton, Madison and Washington counties.
She's battling the elements. Tombstones have been leveled by grazing cattle and falling trees. Some are scarred by bullets.
Miller became interested in cemeteries while working as a dump truck driver for the Benton County road department, a job she had from 1998-2011. When former Benton County Judge Gary Black received complaints about overgrown rural graveyards, he would send jail inmates to clean them up, with Miller as the driver of the van.
Since retiring in 2011, Miller has been able to spend more time working as a volunteer cemetery researcher. She's on the board of the Benton County Cemetery Preservation Group. Founded in 1996, the group is dedicated to saving the county's cemeteries. There are 315 known locations in Benton County that contain graves, including public cemeteries, family plots and single graves. A similar nonprofit group for Washington County was incorporated in August.
"She's been donating her time to cemeteries for a number of years," said Nancy Feroe of Gravette, president of the Benton County Cemetery Preservation Group. "She does an outstanding job. She lives this. She breathes this. She loves coordinating the efforts."
Miller takes care of 13 cemeteries that are up for "adoption," places with names such as Poor Farm and Post Oak. Inmates still help her clean them about once a month. At other times, Boy Scouts help and get credit toward merit badges.
Feroe said some of the small cemeteries in Benton County are private, while others are public. In some cases, small family plots were deeded to the county and have their own property record numbers.
Feroe said they "get razzed all the time" for caring so much about the deceased, but the people who call them wanting to know where an ancestor is buried are very much alive.
Genealogy work
Miller spends three days a week volunteering in the genealogy section of the Bentonville Public Library, where three other women help her do cemetery research. They plan to have an online database of cemetery information, but they don't know when or where yet, Feroe said.
Other websites -- such as findagrave.com and arkansasgravestones.org -- already contain information about Benton County cemeteries, but not as much as Miller and her helpers are compiling. For one thing, the new database will include the names of people who are buried in cemeteries but don't have headstones, Feroe said.
"We found a lot that didn't have stones," Miller said. "Most people didn't mark the graves back then. It was just a rock."
Miller helped William Degge, 74, research a book documenting more than 5,000 Civil War Confederate graves in the three counties. That number doesn't include the hundreds of people buried in the Confederate Cemetery in Fayetteville. The book was published in 2011 and is available for review in Northwest Arkansas libraries.
"She spends her own money sometimes getting these cemeteries cleaned up," Degge said. "She doesn't do anything halfway. She's pretty intense. She's obsessed with it. She spends all of her time on it."
Miller refers to Degge as her boyfriend. Degge agreed.
Miller and Degge cross-reference lists of Confederate soldiers with obituaries, records from monument companies, information from family members and names on tombstones.
It's tedious work, but it's a labor of love, Degge said.
Feroe said the work Degge and Miller are doing will be a valuable resource for future generations.
"That is a comprehensive collection of all these Civil War Confederate veterans," she said.
The work continues as they try to find the graves of known Confederate soldiers to update the book. The new edition will include an addendum with wives and other family members. Obituaries are published in the book if they are available.
Degge said they haven't determined when the next edition will come out.
"I'm asking family members to bring us any information," Miller said.
Family plots
When the graves of Union soldiers are located, that information is collected in case another researcher decides to do a book on the Union graves. In some cases, soldiers fought for both sides, Miller said.
Miller said the Hart family recently agreed to deed Woods Cemetery in Little Flock to the Benton County Cemetery Preservation Group. It's one of those cemeteries that had been on a rural family farm but is now surrounded by a subdivision. Feroe said the Woods family settled in the area before Arkansas was granted statehood in 1836.
Miller was surveying Woods Cemetery on Tuesday.
"We've got two or three Civil War men buried in here," she said, noting the dates on some of the headstones."They had let cattle run in here at one time, and there was a bunch of headstones knocked down."
Some of the tombstones at Woods Cemetery are unreadable. People were buried in neat rows, about 70 all together, she said.
As people age, they sometimes become unable to care for family cemetery plots, and the youngest family members haven't developed an interest in the history, Miller said.
According to Arkansas Code Annotated 5-39-212, a "cemetery" must be made accessible to the public, but a "private family burial plot" doesn't have to be. As defined in the statute, a "private family burial plot" contains fewer than six commercial headstones, has not been used for a burial in the past 25 years and has not had an access road in 30 years.
Miller said most property owners give her and other researchers access to old family burial plots if they call ahead and ask. But not always.
In some cases, old grudges are still alive, Miller said. Sometimes descendants of Confederate sympathizers don't want people walking across their land to visit the graves of their Union kin. And vice versa, Miller said.
NW News on 09/23/2014