Stone Gardens: Montgomery County pioneer farmer's father endured two hangings during the Civil War

Elbert Carter Markham

Elbert Carter Markham spent his sixty-three years in the shadowed folds of the Ouachita Mountains where the Caddo River cuts through pine and oak.

He was born in 1849 in Colbath Township of Clark County, a place that would later split into pieces of Montgomery and Pike counties.

His father Carter Markham had arrived in the region as a young man from Alabama and built a life there as a Baptist preacher.

The family story that passed down through generations centered on Carter’s survival during the Civil War.

Union soldiers caught him once and hanged him from a tree leaving him for dead with the rope still around his neck. Bushwhackers found him later and strung him up a second time.

Both times the rope failed to finish the job. Carter lived on with thick scars circling his throat and kept preaching in the small churches and clearings of the mountain townships.

That endurance became the quiet center of the Markham household

.Elbert grew up in the years right after the war when the county lines kept shifting and the land stayed hard to farm. The Markhams worked small plots along the river bottoms and ridges raising corn and a few head of stock. They cleared timber when they could and traded for what the mountains did not yield.

By the time Elbert reached adulthood he had taken up the same work. Census records from the 1880s place him in the Mountain Township of Pike County not far from the family’s original holdings. He listed no trade beyond the steady round of plowing seeding and harvesting that defined most men in the district.

The soil was thin in places and the growing season short but the Markhams had stayed put through boundary changes and hard times. His first marriage to a woman named Elizabeth ended early. She and several of their young children died before the family could put down deeper roots.

Their graves lie unmarked now in the grass around Elbert’s own plot at Rock Springs Cemetery in Montgomery County. Neighbors remembered the losses as part of the ordinary grief that visited mountain households.

Elbert later married Martha Francis Kirkendall in the 1880s. Together they raised four children who reached adulthood: Effie Cordella who married into the Reans family Carrie Lucinda who became a Rainwater Partha who wed a Whitmore and Augustus known as Gus who stayed closest to the home place.

The children were born in the Polk and Montgomery County stretch of the Caddo valley and they carried the family name into the next century.Elbert never sought attention beyond the township. He farmed the same kind of ground his father had worked before the war.

The Markhams had helped settle Colbath Township back when it was still raw frontier. They knew the Indian trails that became wagon roads and the quartz seams that later drew miners. Elbert lived through the shift from open-range herding to fenced fields and from hand tools to the first steam-powered sawmills that cut the big timber.

He watched the county organize around Mount Ida and Black Springs and he kept his place in the rhythm of planting and gathering. When he died on 29 June 1912 he was buried at Rock Springs among the unmarked stones of his first family. Martha outlived him by nearly thirty years and rests nearby.

The legacy of Elbert Carter Markham rests less in public markers than in the persistence of the family line. His father’s scars and sermons had taught the children that survival in these hills required both grit and faith. Elbert passed that lesson forward without ceremony.

His daughters and son raised families of their own in the same mountain counties. Some stayed on the land others moved a few valleys over but the name Markham stayed tied to the Ouachita country.

Great-grandchildren still speak of the preacher who would not stay hanged and of the son who farmed the ridges without complaint.

In the quiet of Rock Springs Cemetery the stones and the unmarked spots together tell the story of a family that arrived early stayed long and measured life by the turn of the seasons rather than by fame or fortune.