Our Arklahoma Heritage: A Family's Story - From Valley Forge to a final resting place in Dayton Cemetery
In a quiet stretch of Sebastian County along a lonely highway, the Dayton Cemetery holds the remains of William Thomas Colley, known simply during his lifetime as as "Tom".
Born in January 1849 in Kentucky, he died in 1931 at about eighty-two and was buried there beside his wife Rebecca Melvina Pilley, who had gone the year before. Their markers sit among others of the same blood. His daughter Sarah Melissa Colley Neisler rests nearby along with later kin whose stones show the family did not merely pass through western Arkansas.
It stayed.
Tom’s life began with fracture. His parents Ance C. Colley, born about 1826 in Kentucky, and Mary Frances Chunn born about 1827, died together in a wagon accident around 1860 in Calloway County when their children were still young.
The orphans were scattered among kin. Tom came west with his maternal aunt Obedience J. Chunn and her husband James R. Ford. By 1870, the census found the young man living next door to the Ford family n Sebastian County.
He married Rebecca Melvina Pilley, born 20 April 1852, and they raised a large family that included Elizabeth William, Graften, Robert, Rance, Rain, George B, Sarah, Melissa, Clyde, and Leon.
They farmed the Arkansas River country until both were carried to Dayton.
Behind Ance and Mary Frances, the lines reach farther still.
Mary Frances was the daughter of Bolen Chunn and Hollie Crowder.
Bolen’s father was Sylvester Chunn, born April 1758 in Charles County, Maryland, and died April 12, 1841 in Marshall County, Tennessee.
Sylvester enlisted as a private and fifer in the Virginia Continental Line on 1 February 1777. He fought at Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, and Guilford Courthouse and spent the hard winter at Valley Forge.
After the war, his pension was suspended until a young congressman named James K. Polk wrote on his behalf, calling him "an honest, worthy but very poor man".
The payments resumed. Sylvester’s own father, John Chunn, had died before 1760 leaving the boy bound out as an apprentice. The Chunn name appears in Maryland records into the early 1700s.
Other branches push deeper. Through lines that later joined the Colley's in Arkansas the Tidwell ancestry reaches Richard Tidwell, born about 1635 in England and settled in Westmoreland County Virginia by the mid-seventeenth century.
From those Tidewater beginnings, the family moved south through the Carolinas and into Tennessee before some crossed into Arkansas. Scotch-Irish Bourland roots and other c
olonial Virginia and North Carolina strains run through the same web.
What holds the attention is the distance covered. A family tree whose earliest documented limbs reach the middle of the 1600s in England and colonial Maryland can still send living branches into a pastoral rural cemetery beside a quiet highway in Sebastian County.
William Thomas Colley and his wife lie there surrounded by children and grandchildren while descendants continue to fill western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma.
The stones at Dayton mark the quiet end of centuries of migration war orphanhood and settlement.
Even the longest lines eventually find ordinary ground in which to rest.
