Stone Gardens: His brides were nine years older and twenty-three years younger across two marriages
Bill Burk was born on March 19, 1845, in Kentucky, a first son for William Joseph Lafayette Burk and Sarah Felkins Burk.
Joseph had been born in North Carolina in 1815 and married Sarah on December 28, 1844. Before long they did what a lot of families were doing then. They packed up and headed west into the Ozark hills of Madison County and settled among kin along Kings River and Felkins Creek. The creek still carries Sarah’s people in its name.
The war wrecked that quiet. On September 6, 1864, Joseph Burk and his neighbor John A. Tucker were shot off their horses on Kings River by Confederate soldiers or bushwhackers. Joseph was about forty-nine. Sarah later said he had ridden with Captain Bevins’s Independent Company of Arkansas Cavalry, a home-guard outfit the National Archives never recorded.
Her pension claim was denied. The men stayed back, afraid they would be next. The women washed the bodies, yoked the oxen, and hauled the two friends up to a little burying ground in the Bolinger settlement.
They put them in one grave. A later stone says they were bushwhacked and buried by their women. Bill was nineteen.
Two years after the war ended, he married Eliza Ane Shelton, on October 14, 1867, in Madison County. She was born in 1836, nine years older than he was. They farmed in the Weathers neighborhood and raised their first children through Reconstruction, when the ridges still remembered bushwhackers and a man judged safety by cleared ground, family close by, and a piece of land he could hold.
Eliza died in 1886. She and Bill share a double stone in Burk Cemetery. The line they chose is from Revelation: Blessed Are The Dead Which Died In The Lord.
Around 1888 Bill married again. Martha Jane Whitmire was born in Georgia in 1868, some twenty-three years younger than he. They stayed on the same land and raised another household there.
One daughter from that marriage, Frances Sarah, lived from 1892 to 1993 and carried the family’s Ozark story almost to the end of the century. Martha Jane was not laid beside Bill.
When she died in 1927 they buried her in Kingston Cemetery, the bigger community ground a few miles north.
Burk Cemetery is a small family plot in a field on the left of County Road 3655, about three-quarters of a mile past the low-water bridge over Felkins Creek, in Section 10, Township 15 North, Range 24 West. It sits on land later tied to Clifford Leon Taylor, less than a mile from old Weathers.
That is how Ozark families claimed a place after the war. Town lots in Kingston or Huntsville were farther and cost money. A rise in a home field, fenced off from the stock and named for the household that opened it, kept the dead among the people they had worked beside.
The Burk ground almost surely started that way, on or next to land the family farmed after Joseph was killed, within sight of the creek that already bore the Felkins name. Eliza’s burial in 1886, and Bill’s choice thirty-five years later to lie with her instead of with Martha Jane, made it the first family’s place.
No compiled service record has turned up for Bill. He came of age in a county split down the middle and chewed up by guerrilla fighting. What lasts is the staying. He buried a father the war took, buried a first wife, raised two generations on the same hills, and died May 20, 1921, at Weathers, seventy-six years old.
They carried him out past Felkins Creek and set him under the stone he already shared with Eliza. The cemetery that took his name is still what they meant it to be, a quiet acre of Burk dead in the pasture, answering to the creek and the road that run on toward Kingston.
