Our Arklahoma Heritage: A tragic death after a fall from a horse set a community cemetery in motion in 1891

Emil A. Measles

A young husband of a pioneer family in southern Sebastian County was thrown from a horse and died of his injuries. His name was Emil A. Measles. He was twenty-two. The date was January 14, 1891.

He had married Lula Seward on December 19, 1888, in Sebastian County.

After the fall, she learned she was expecting. On September 7, 1891, at Lavaca, she bore their only child and named him Emil A. Measles after the father who would never see him.

That death, on land his parents already farmed, is why there is a cemetery on Highway 96.

John W. Measles and Martha Caroline Norman Measles buried their son on their own ground rather than send him elsewhere. The plot sat on the east side of Lavaca. It remained a private family cemetery until 1960, when it opened to the public as Measles Memorial Cemetery.

A road still runs straight into the graves, east and west of the lane. Oaks once shaded the rows until a storm in 1996 took them. The First Baptist Church of Lavaca stands nearby. The sign at the gate now reads Measles Memorial Public Cemetery.

What began as one grave became the burying ground for the families who helped settle that end of the county.

The name on the gate is older than Arkansas. John was born in 1841 in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, to Miles Measles and Elizabeth Rooks Measles. The surname had been Mizell in North Carolina. About 1814 to 1818, three grandsons of John Mizell of Chowan Precinct left Bertie County for Tennessee and took the name Measles. Miles farmed in Lauderdale. The spelling on the 1850 census was still Mizell; by 1860 the household was Measles. John grew up in that shift.

On November 11, 1861, at twenty, he enlisted for one year in Captain C. H. Conner’s company, which became Company E of King’s Kentucky Cavalry Battalion and, by the following spring, the First Confederate Cavalry.

On March 11, 1862, that command was camped on the ridge west of Paris, Tennessee, covering the roads toward Dresden and Como after the fall of Forts Henry and Heiman.

Grant sent a column out from Paris Landing--four companies of Curtis’s Horse and a Missouri battery. The fight lasted less than an hour. John’s muster for April 30 is blunt: absent, “captured by the enemy near Paris, Tenn. 11 March 62 with horse & equipment.”

He went in as a mounted cavalryman and left as a prisoner leading his own horse. The handful of men taken that day were sent downriver to Cairo.

Exchange in 1862 was still relatively quick for enlisted men. A later card notes that he “resigned” on October 1, 1862--the end of the one-year term, or the date he was dropped and taken back onto the rolls after parole.

From October 30, 1862, through April 30, 1863, the same cards read “absent at wagon train.”

After that he is carried as a teamster until the end. He was not driving for a civilian freight line or for the family farm. He was driving for the Confederate quartermaster--the wagons that fed, armed, and moved the First Confederate Cavalry and the larger mounted commands it served under.

A teamster’s work was mules, axles, forage, and roads that turned to gumbo. It kept a man who had already lost one horse and one set of gear off a second enlistment as combat cavalry and still counted him present until the surrender convention of April 26, 1865. The roll that mustered him out cites that convention; the regiment stacked arms at Gainesville, Alabama, on May 12.

He went home to Lauderdale County and, on May 29, 1867, married Martha Caroline Norman. By 1870 they were farming in Civil District 10 with a two-year-old son, Emil, born March 18, 1868.

Miles and Elizabeth lived a few houses down the road. Between that census and 1880 the family moved west to Sebastian County and settled the ground east of Lavaca. Four more children followed: Emma Dora, John Doniven, Sarah Anne, Lillie Viola, and Merritt Monroe. In 1880, John was still a farmer. In 1910, at sixty-nine, he was still farming, next door to Merritt.

The first grave on that farm was the son born in Tennessee. Emil married Lula Seward in 1888, was thrown from a horse in January 1891, and was buried where his father chose to keep him.

Lula delivered the second Emil that September. Martha died in 1911. John died November 14, 1914, and was laid beside her. The plot stayed in the family until 1960, when it opened to the public. The oaks came down in the storm of 1996. The lane still runs east and west through the stones.

The boy captured at Paris with his horse and gear, the teamster who finished the war on a wagon seat, the farmer who would not send his son to another burying ground--that is the name on the gate. It began as Mizell in Chowan Precinct, became Measles in Lauderdale County,.

He married Martha on May 29, 1867. She was the daughter of Zachariah Norman and Theresa Frances Crocker Norman, both born in South Carolina. Martha’s sister Mary Ann also married into the Measles line, to John’s brother Timothy, so two Norman sisters bound two Measles brothers.

Lula Mesles Templeton

The household left Tennessee between 1870 and 1880 and was at Lavaca by the time Lillie Viola and Merritt Monroe were born. They returned to Tennessee around the turn of the century, then came back. In 1910, John was still farming next door to Merritt.

Lula did not remain a widow.

She married Rufus Alfred Templeton and raised a second family: Elector Rachel, Mary Fay, William Clarence, Charley M., Ver J., Maude L., and John Rufus.

The boy named for the first Emil grew up among Measles kin at Lavaca and Templeton half siblings after that second marriage. On November 11, 1916, he married Nancy Wilson, born about 1893.

They had been wed less than two years when he entered the Army. He was assigned to a Service Company of the 1st Motor Transport Corps, the wartime branch that took over trucks, repair, and haul from the old horse army. His stone later read Service Co. 1 M.O.T.C.

He did not die in France. On October 12, 1918, at twenty-seven, he died in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in the weeks when influenza and pneumonia tore through camps and towns.

Emil Measles Jr. .

Lula did not remain a widow.

 She married Rufus Alfred Templeton and raised a second family: Elector Rachel, Mary Fay, William Clarence, Charley M., Ver J., Maude L., and John Rufus. Jr.

The inscription chosen for him was "He gave his all". He was buried at Greenhill Cemetery in Muskogee, not on Highway 96.

Nancy’s later years are thinly recorded. No child of that brief marriage is named on his memorial. His mother lived until 1957. Most of his Measles relatives remained at Lavaca and lie in the cemetery his grandfather opened the day the first Emil was laid down.

The stones at Lavaca tell who stayed.

John and Martha share a marker that says Father and Mother. She died in 1911. He died November 14, 1914. John Doniven and Emily Lou Wilkerson Measles are there. Annie Stem and her husband John are there. Emma Dora Kidd and Benjamin Kidd are there. Lillie Viola Chapman, her husband Robert, and their son Wheeler are there

Merritt’s infant, born and died on January 12, 1910, is there.

Johnsons lie in the same ground: T. L. Johnson, Thomas L., Sallie L., Ollie, Audry, Pearl M., and Pearl M. Webb Johnson. Miles and Julia Miles, Browns, Newmans, Pucketts, and others filled the rows as the farm cemetery became the neighborhood’s. Fieldstones mark Measles babies and Wilkerson babies.

Other graves were never named. Among them stand identical granite markers that read "Known by God". Those stones do the work a surname cannot. They say someone was buried here, even if the ledger never caught the name.

That is what the horse fall made, and what the next generation carried forward. A private acre on Highway 96 became the memorial of the families who founded this edge of Sebastian County, named and unnamed alike.

The Mizells who became Measles in Tennessee, the Normans and Crockers who came up from South Carolina, the Johnsons who shared the hill, the Templetons who raised the orphaned namesake, the children who lived into the 1960s, the soldier buried at Muskogee with "He gave his all " on his stone, and the graves that answer only "Known by Go" all trace back to the land John and Martha opened the day they laid the first Emil down.