Stone Gardens: Anderson ventured into Indian territory as a young man whose father died when he was six
The scattered hills west of Vinita hold a community-designated place once known as Estella, a modest rural community in what became Craig County after statehood in 1907. Nearby stands Timpson Chapel and its cemetery, a site rooted in the Cherokee Nation long before the county lines were drawn.
In 1872, Eliza Buzzard set aside three acres of her allotment for a chapel, a school, and a burying ground. The place took its name from Yo Nah, known as Bear Timpson a full-blood Cherokee of Civil War times whose original family name was Smith.
The oldest recorded graves date to 1874, just two years after the chapel rose, and the grounds have remained a sacred gathering place for the families who farmed and worshipped in the surrounding countryside. Estella itself never grew into a large town, yet it served as a local center with a school and community building that anchored the lives of those who settled the prairies northwest of Vinita.
Into this landscape came Charles Henry Anderson, a Nebraska-born Cornhusker whose journey began far to the north.
He entered the world on the thirteenth of February in 1866 in Nemaha County near the settlement of St Derion. His father, Eli B. Anderson, had been born in Ohio in 1820 and had briefly worn the uniform of a corporal in Company F of the Thirteenth Kansas Infantry after enlisting at Pardee in 1862, only to leave the service the next year.
Eli died in 1872 when Charles was six years old, leaving the boy and his brothers and sisters in the care of their mother, Elizabeth M. "Lizzie" Laird Anderson, who had been born in Muskingum County, Ohio in 1830 . The early loss of his father marked the beginning of a life shaped by the hard necessities of the frontier.
As a young man, Charles moved southward across the plains of Kansas. On the thirtieth of September in 1888, at the age of twenty-two, he married Annie May Davis at the Church of the First Born near Fort Scott. Annie had been born in Illinois on the twelfth of August in 1875.
The couple started their family at once. Their son Francis Marion Anderson was born in 1888 and lived until 1958. Alfred Eli Anderson followed in 1899 and died in 1949. Other children included Alva M Anderson, Alvin Lee Anderson, and Bessie Jewel Anderson, who was born in 1903, married Joseph Mayes Terrell, and was later laid to rest in the same Timpson Chapel ground as her father.
In time, the family crossed into Indian Territory and settled in the rural reaches near Estella. Charles lived as a countryman tied to the land and to the chapel community that had been established decades earlier. No formal record of advanced schooling or military service of his own has come to light, yet the practical education of farm and family sustained him through the years.
He remained in Craig County until the twentieth of November in 1931 when he died in Vinita at the age of sixty five. His body was carried to Timpson Chapel Cemetery and placed in plot seventy according to the old plat maps.
Annie lived on until the middle of July in 1955, dying near Longview, Washington. Whether she returned to rest beside him remains uncertain.
The stone that marks Charles Henry Anderson still stands among the quiet rows a lasting witness to a Nebraska boy who crossed the Kansas plains and found his final home in the sacred soil of Estella.
