Stone Gardens: A life was lost on US Highway 64 in 1963 when a wife, mother, and grandmother stepped into traffic
The family of Lillie Dale Underwood Cravens lost their matriarchal figurehead in a tragic accident on a rural Oklahoma highway in March 1963.
Born Lillie Dale Underwood on February 14, 1897, in Arkansas to John Lucian Underwood and Parlee Tennessee Waddell Underwood, she grew up in a large family that eventually numbered at least nine children.
The Underwoods made their home in the Craig and Mountain townships of Van Buren County, Arkansas, where the 1900 and 1910 censuses recorded the household amid the hardscrabble farming life of the Ozark foothills.
By the early 1920s the family’s ties had stretched into eastern Oklahoma, and in 1920 Lillie married William Robert Cravens, a man two years her senior. The couple settled near Keota in Haskell County and raised four children: Goldie, Flonnie, Lindsey, and Albert
. For more than four decades she kept house on Route 1, west of the small town, while her husband worked the land or whatever labor the sparse local economy offered. Her siblings scattered across Arkansas, Oklahoma, California, and Utah, yet the Iron Bridge community remained her fixed point.
Iron Bridge itself took its name from the iron bridges that once spanned the creeks and streams of the old Beale Wagon Road, a mid-nineteenth-century military and commercial route that threaded through present-day Haskell County.
One such span crossed Sans Bois Creek less than a mile from the cemetery that still bears the name. The settlement never grew into a true town. It remained a loose collection of farms, a church, and the burial ground that served families who had put down roots after statehood.
Iron Bridge Cemetery, located just southwest of Keota along what is now East 1225 Road near State Highway 26, holds the markers of those early settlers and their descendants. Plot 91 would become Lillie’s final resting place.
On the morning of Tuesday, March 19, 1963, the routine of rural life turned fatal. At approximately 9:30 a.m., Mrs. Cravens, then sixty-five or sixty-six depending on the source, crossed the highway in front of her home to retrieve the mail from the box on the north side of the road. A witness later told investigators that she appeared to be watching a vehicle approaching from the west and did not see the 1962 GMC pickup driven by Luther E. Ellis, fifty-eight, of Edgemont, Arkansas, coming from the east.
She stepped into its path. The impact occurred in the center of the westbound lane. Her body was thrown seventeen feet from the point of collision. Highway Trooper Bill Tucker confirmed the details. Death was nearly instantaneous.
Services were held the following day at 2 p.m. in the Iron Bridge Church with the Reverend Robert Carter officiating. Mallory Funeral Home of Stigler directed the burial in Iron Bridge Cemetery.
She left behind her husband W. R. Cravens of the home, sons Lindsey of Oklahoma City and Albert of Mount Vernon, Missouri, daughters Mrs. Flonnie Coy of Vernal, Utah, and Mrs. Goldie Harp of Stigler, five sisters, three brothers, and four grandchildren.
No contemporary newspaper accounts or later records have surfaced indicating that criminal charges were filed against Luther E. Ellis. The accident was reported as a tragic collision on a rural highway, the kind of sudden violence that occasionally interrupted the daily life of 1960s Haskell County.
Traffic volumes on secondary roads were far lower than today, and fatal pedestrian incidents remained uncommon enough to merit front-page notice in the Stigler News-Sentinel. Yet the very ordinariness of the errand--collecting the mail--only heightens the sense of loss.
One moment a woman of sixty-six years was completing a daily task outside the home she had shared with her husband for more than forty years. The next moment she was gone, her life reduced to a brief notice and a plot among the iron-bridge pioneers.
Lillie lies next to William Robert, along with the other members of the Cravens family—a gathering of generations that defined the rural enclave for decades. Among those buried in Iron Bridge Cemetery are Acquilla Colfax Cravens (1866–1941, Plot 89), Angeline Garland Cravens (1869–1963, Plot 88), George Ray Cravens (1891–1981), Ellen McClard Cravens (1893–1995), Olen Vester Cravens (1915–2002), John M. Cravens (1919–1982), Lorene E. Cravens (1924–2003), Lindsey Cravens (1931–1991), Kenneth Earl Cravens (1932–1997), Dennis Mearle Cravens (1934–2004), Billy Ray “Bill” Cravens (1944–1994), and Mamie Cravens (1907–1987). William Robert Cravens himself rests in Plot 92 beside his wife.
The cemetery continues to receive the descendants of those early families. The surrounding community of Iron Bridge has faded further into the landscape of eastern Oklahoma farmland, its name now known chiefly to those who tend the graves or drive the narrow roads past the old bridge sites.
Lillie Dale Underwood Cravens rests there still, one more quiet story among the stones, a reminder that even the most ordinary lives can end with a sudden and irreversible violence on a stretch of highway that once seemed safe.
