Stone Gardens: A hushed cemetery a few miles north of Van Buren is the final resting place of 1812 veteran Hiram Bourne

In Crawford County near the Dripping Spring community, the Bourne Whitfield Family Cemetery stands as a quiet sentinel to one man's odyssey across frontiers of war, wilderness, and family.

This modest plot of earth, anchored in the hearts of descendants, holds the weathered stones of Whitfield Bourne (1798–1879), a pioneer whose life bridged the raw edges of American expansion.

Here, amid the wildflowers and cedars, his story unfolds like roots delving deep into the soil: a tale of survival, settlement, and steadfast character. Bourne was a man who tamed the untamed and left a lineage that still echoes through the Ozarks.

Whitfield Bourne entered the world on August 24, 1798, in Jessamine County, Kentucky, born to Francis Abner Bourne (1768–1847) and Elizabeth "Betsy" Hayden Bourne (1770–1846), amid the tobacco fields and horse country of Lexington.

s father, a farmer of modest means, embodied the restless spirit of post-Revolutionary settlers; the Bourne line traced back to Virginia transplants seeking fertile ground in the inner Bluegrass.

Young Whitfield grew up in a household of eleven siblings, including brothers Levi (1794–1856), Joseph Richard (1795–1856), Francis "Frank" (1813–1887), and Hudson I (1814–1887), in an era when Kentucky was America's western edge, teeming with opportunity yet shadowed by Native American raids and the looming War of 1812.

By age 16, health woes stirred the family's westward gaze. The Bournes, like countless Kentucky clans, eyed the Arkansas Territory as a balm for weary bodies and bursting broods.

This migration mirrored broader tides: from 1810 to 1830, over 20,000 Kentuckians funneled into Arkansas via the Arkansas River, drawn by cheap land grants and the promise of isolation from eastern taxes.

Francis Abner would later drift to Lewis County, Missouri, by 1840, dying there in 1848, but Whitfield struck out alone, his path a solitary thread in the family's unraveling quilt.

At 15, Whitfield's boyhood shattered with the thunder of war. Enlisting under General William Henry Harrison's Northwest Army, he joined the Ohio campaigns against British-allied Tecumseh's confederacy. His baptism by battle came at the Siege of Fort Meigs in May 1813, a brutal 19-day standoff on the Maumee River where American forces repelled 1,200 warriors.

Amid the chaos of cannon fire and scalping cries, young Bourne and a comrade were captured by Shawnee fighters, dragged across Lake Erie to a Canadian prison camp. or weeks, he endured captivity's cruelties of starvation and isolation before a daring escape.

Wandering three days through dense woods, he reached the lake's edge, fashioning a crude canoe from bark. Struck by fever (the "prevailing malady" of marsh fevers), he collapsed unconscious on the shore, only to revive and press on to a frontier blockhouse.

Nursed back by a kind settler family, Bourne rejoined his regiment, his service etched into pension rolls as a private in Captain Lewis' Company. Honored posthumously on Arkansas's War of 1812 Monument at the State Capitol, his survival marked him as one of the territory's earliest veterans, his scars a silent testament to the 20,000 Americans who fell in that forgotten conflict.

Demobilized by 1815, Whitfield returned to Kentucky, marrying only after reaching manhood. But the pull of the west proved irresistible. Around 1818, plagued by lingering ailments, he ventured to Crawford County, then a raw frontier of Osage hunting grounds and Spanish land grants.

Settling first a few miles south of Van Buren, he scratched a living from the rich soils of the Arkansas River bottoms.I n 1825, lured by the federal Lovely Purchase, he relocated to its Cherokee-leased edges near modern Sallisaw.

Here, amid canebrakes and buffalo trails, Bourne farmed corn and hogs, his cabin a beacon for wayfarers.

DRBut in 1828, the U.S. ceded the land to the Cherokee Nation under the Treaty of Washington, evicting white squatters in a wave of bitter removals.

Bourne retreated north to Dripping Springs, claiming 160 acres that would anchor his legacy.

Tax rolls from 1829 list him among Crawford's 200 taxable souls as a property owner, and voter

rOn September 4, 1831, at 33, he wed Clarinda Weaver (1813–1851), a 18-year-old from White County, Tennessee, whose family had paralleled his migration. Their union bore three children: Margaret Ann (1839–1903, who married into the Robbersons), Benjamin Franklin "Frank" (1841–1889), and Levi L. "Lee" (1845–1888).

Clarinda's death in 1851at 38, from childbirth feverleft Whitfield a widower.

In 1852, he remarried Madaline Pric (1822–1887), a Tennessee widow of quiet strength. Their five childrenincluding Delphia (1853–1921, m. Harshaw), Harry Clay (1855–1930), Dudley (1857–1949), and two others lost young, swelling the farmstead to a bustling clan.

The Bournes raised cattle, grew peaches, and wove tight kin networks; descendants still whisper of Madaline's herbal remedies and Whitfield's fiddle tunes under Ozark stars

.Publicly, Bourne shone as a civic architect. In 1836, as Arkansas joined the Union, he served on the commission selecting Crawford's county seat, convening in a raucous November 1837 session to decree Van Buren the victor over rivals like Fort Smith, as Sebastian County was still unformed.

A Cumberland Presbyterian elder, he helped seed the county's first churches, his faith a bulwark against the era's sorrows : the 1830s cholera scourge, 1840s land speculator booms, and the 1861 Civil War's shadow

.The war ravaged his prosperity. As a Union-leaning border county, Crawford saw guerrilla raids; Bourne, too old for muster, lost livestock and barns to foraging armies.

yet he endured, his farm a haven for refugees.

Whitfield Bourne drew his last breath on April 1, 1879, at 80 years, 7 months, and 7 days, his failing health claiming him on the homestead he cherished. Buried in the family cemetery he helped consecrate, his stone reads simply: "Whitfield Bourne, Aug. 24, 1798 – Apr. 1, 1879".

Madaline joined him eight years later, her marker a companion stonel. Today, the plot cradles over a dozen Bournes, children and grandchildren alike, its fences mended by latter-day kin, a flourishing t garden of memory amid Dripping Springs' creeks.

Bourne's legacy? Not monuments or fortunes, but the soil he turned and the blood he passed.

His land stayed in family hands for generations, yielding Bourne descendants who farmed, fought in world wars, and scattered to California and beyond.

Hailed in county histories as "honest, kind, hospitable, of unsullied reputation," he embodied the settler's creed: build, endure, belong. In an age of empire-building, Whitfield chose roots, deep and unyielding, just like the cedars shading his stone.