Stone Gardens: Quiet Johnson County cemetery is the final resting place of a true pioneering Arkansas woman

Delilah Stover Adams

Deep within the rugged folds of the Ozark Mountains lies Catalpa Cemetery, a small and timeworn burial ground that breathes the quiet poetry of Arkansas’s pioneer past.

Hidden in the unincorporated hollow of Catalpa, Johnson County, the site sits among the steep ridges and rushing creeks of the Boston Mountains, a place where early settlers wrestled a living from the rocky soil and where history lingers in the wind.

Founded sometime in the mid-1800s, Catalpa was never meant to be grand. It began, as many frontier cemeteries did, as a family plot and a modest resting place for farmers who endured isolation and hardship, marking graves with fieldstones or simple memory.

Today, only four documented memorials remain online, but those few headstones tell of a people who built endurance into their very bones.

Among them, in an unmarked grave, lies one of those original settlers: Delilah Stover Adams, a woman whose life spanned nearly a century and whose journey from Tennessee to Arkansas mirrors the story of America’s westward heart.

Born on October 18, 1814, in the shadow of Tennessee’s Watauga Valley, Delilah was the daughter of Sergeant Daniel Stover and Phoebe Ward Stover, both descendants of Revolutionary and frontier stock.

Her father, a Pennsylvania-born soldier who served in the War of 1812 under Colonel Wear, carried with him the sturdy blood of German-Dutch immigrants who had pushed ever westward. Her mother, born amid the early Tennessee settlements, was connected by kinship and courage to the Overmountain Men who carved out the new nation at the Battle of Kings Mountain.

From that heritage, Delilah learned early that the frontier demanded equal parts toughness and tenderness. She grew up in the wild edges of Carter County, Tennessee, one of several children in a household that would eventually blend into a large extended family through her father’s later remarriage.

Siblings and half-siblings spread across Tennessee’s hills and hollows, but Delilah’s path would soon lead farther still.

Sometime around 1832, in her late teens, she married Henry Adams, a young Tennessean whose eyes, like hers, turned west. Together they joined the swelling tide of settlers moving along the old Southwest Trail toward the Arkansas Territory.

Their wagon would have creaked with heirlooms like Phoebe’s spinning wheel and Daniel’s musket, symbols of the life they left behind and the hope they carried ahead.

By 1850, the couple had rooted themselves in Horsehead Township, Johnson County, where they farmed 160 acres of hardscrabble hillside.

The census lists Henry as a farmer and Delilah as “keeping house,” but such phrases hardly capture the breadth of their labor. They were builders of lives from nothing, raising corn and cattle amid the rocks, tending children and faith in equal measure.

Their family grew and flourished, even as the land tested them. Their eldest daughter, Sarah Adams Welch, stayed close to home and carried on the family’s traditions. William Stover Adams, born in 1840, bore his mother’s maiden name with pride and followed in his father’s farming footsteps. Icie Vinda Adams Long, Margaret “Maggie” Adams Cole, and Henry Thomas Adams rounded out the brood with each a thread in the expanding tapestry of Stover-Adams descendants who would populate the Ozarks.

Then came the Civil War, tearing through Johnson County like a fever. The region, deeply divided in its loyalties, saw families torn apart and homesteads burned. Henry Adams died in 1865, a casualty of the war’s unending violence.

At 51, Delilah was left a widow, steering her household through Reconstruction’s thin years with little more than her own strength and the help of her grown children.

She endured. Through long winters and poor harvests, through the changing of generations, Delilah lived to see the dawn of the 20th century as a survivor of two frontiers, one geographic and one spiritual.

 When she passed away on September 16, 1902 in Catalpa she was 87 years old. Her life had bridged the early Republic and the age of railroads, the wilderness and the modern world. Her body was laid to rest in the quiet of Catalpa’s soil, though her exact grave may never be precisely known.

Today, Delilah’s resting place is remembered as being beneath the shade of catalpa trees that gave the settlement its name.

Her final resting place stands as a modern monument to a pioneer spirit that refused to vanish into time.

To visit Catalpa today is to touch that history. The cemetery has no gates, no manicured lawns, only the raw, unbroken quiet of the Ozarks. Its GPS coordinates, , lead to a place that still demands effort to reach, as though asking modern pilgrims to earn their glimpse of the past. For those who seek Delilah, that journey is fitting.

. Her story is the story of the Ozarks themselves: rough, enduring, and quietly eternal.