Out Arklahoma Heritage: The family tree of a Jasper newspaper man had roots that stretched to Colonial America

When John Milam thumbed type into a composing stick in a log cabin north of Jasper, he was not inventing a trade so much as carrying forward a family that had already stood at the making of the country.

The line that can be named with confidence begins in 1725 with a Virginia private called John Milam, husband of Judith Bartlett Cole, soldier of the 7th Virginia Regiment in the Revolutionary War.

The Sons of the American Revolution list him as Patriot P-248868. The Daughters of the American Revolution list him as Ancestor A078805.

He died in 1789 in South Carolina. His grave is unknown. His sons Bartlett, Benjamin, and Thomas lived into the first American century.

Bartlett Milam Sr. was born in 1748 in Brunswick County, Virginia, and died in 1822 in Laurens County, South Carolina. A stone in Oak Hill Cemetery at Cartersville, Georgia, remembers him, though it is a cenotaph. He lies in Laurens County with Elizabeth Gwinn, his wife, and with the children who took the name deeper into the Carolina upcountry: John Page, Bartlett Jr., William, Riley, Ferrill, Benjamin, and Nancy.

John Page Milam was born March 26, 1772, in Halifax County, Virginia. He served as an Army captain in the War of 1812 in South Carolina and drew a pension for that service. He died April 15, 1857, in Laurens County and was buried at Providence ARP Church Cemetery near Clinton. With Sarah Ann Fuller, he raised a household that included Leander Jones Milam, born October 1825 in South Carolina.

Leander married Mary Jane Workman and moved to Meriwether County, Georgia, near Warm Springs and Greenville. Their children were Mary A., Ferril A., James Lafayette, Sarah J., Robert H., Irma C., Emily A., Oscar J., and Irwin. Mary Jane died in 1889. Leander died in 1902 and was buried in Milam Cemetery at Gay, Georgia.

James Lafayette Milam was born in 1853 in Laurens, South Carolina. He married Dora Elizabeth Johnson, born February 3, 1854, in Greenville, Meriwether County, Georgia. They had Robert Erbert, Benjamin Ernest, called Benny, John, and Ponce Isabella. James Lafayette died in 1893 at Black Springs, Montgomery County, Arkansas, and was buried in Black Springs Cemetery.

Dora remained. She later married Rev. George Hamilton Wasson. She died in 1932 in Black Springs Township and was laid beside the husband who had carried the name across the Mississippi.

John, called Jay by those who knew the paper, was born April 15, 1887, in Meriwether County, Georgia, near Warm Springs. He became an Arkansas child when his father settled the family at Black Springs, some forty miles west of Hot Springs.

After James Lafayette's early death, the boy grew up in that Ouachita crossroads, learned the printer's case in a town that had published the Black Springs Herald since 1880, and entered the trade in 1902 at fifteen.

He was a Baptist for more than forty years.

In 1905 he married Obie Leona Robbins, born in 1887. Their children were Sadie, who lived only in 1908; Maida, later Jaggers; Hilda, later Conrad; Robbins Lafayette, called Bob; and John Harold. In 1935 he married Nellie Henderson Phillips, born May 28, 1902, daughter of Thomas and Lovice Henderson. Their sons were Garner Fraser, born in 1937, and Leslie Phillip.

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Family memorials also name Flavia Sanderson as a wife.

By the years after the Second World War, he was father of four sons and two daughters who lived to adulthood. Obie died in 1974. Nellie died June 29, 1978, having later married Guy Loomis, and was buried in Jasper Cemetery.

The paper was the public form of that private line. In 1926 John established The Informer at Salem in Fulton County. In 1931 or 1932 he moved it to Jasper, seat of Newton County, and printed the weekly on a flatbed press in a log cabin near the country home five to seven miles north of town on what became Highway 7.

In 1948 he absorbed the Newton County Times, a Democratic weekly begun at Mt. Judea in 1908 by Talmage Greenhaw and later issued by Hudson and Pruitt, Walter P. Murray, Young, and others. For a time, his sheet was the only newspaper in the county and still sold for a dollar a year. At his death it was described across Arkansas as the last hand-set paper in the state.

He died April 7, 1963, in a hospital at Harrison, three weeks short of seventy-six, and was buried April 9, 1963, in Jasper Cemetery.

The Associated Press sent a brief notice that the publisher of the last hand-set newspaper in Arkansas was to be laid to rest that day.

Garner Fraser Milam, the son born after the move to Jasper, published The Informer and then the Informer and Newton County Times from the late 1960s through 1980. He died in 2019. The title survived in the Newton County Times that still covers Buffalo River country.

From a private of the 7th Virginia to a captain of 1812, from Laurens churchyards to Meriwether farms, from a widow's house in Black Springs to a cabin press on Highway 7, the work did not change in kind

. Hold a line. Set it true. Send it out. John Milam's weekly was only the latest form of a family that had already outlasted the birth of the nation, a second war with Britain, and a long walk west.

The type is scattered. The names remain.