Stone Gardens: Victim of Trail of Tears resentment and son were assassinated together September 10, 1853

Southwest of Stilwell, near the old community of Blanch in Adair County, Oklahoma, lies a small patch of earth nearly reclaimed by time. The Adair Cemetery, located in the Township 15N, is a quiet, abandoned family burial ground

. When W.J.B. Bigby surveyed it in 1937 for the Works Progress Administration, he found about 15 graves but only seven with tombstones, simple markers now lost to overgrowth and neglect.

Established around 1840 on land once owned by Cherokee leader Caleb Starr, this modest "stone garden" holds the stories of a violent chapter in Cherokee history.

At its center are the probable resting places of Andrew "Raven" Adair and his son George Washington Adair, father and son murdered on the same day in 1853.

Andrew Adair

Andrew Adair, called "Raven" after the clever bird revered in Cherokee tradition, was born April 20, 1801, in the Cherokee Nation East, in what is now Georgia. Son of Samuel Adair Sr., a Scots-Irish trader, and Margaret Deeson, a mixed-blood Cherokee of the Deer Clan, he grew up in a world of two cultures.

By the 1830s he was a farmer on Oothcalooga Creek with his first wife, Sallie Copeland, and a growing family .Raven's life changed forever with the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. As a signer of the controversial agreement that traded Cherokee lands in the Southeast for territory in the West, he aligned with the Treaty Party, a minority faction opposed by Principal Chief John Ross and most of the Nation.

The treaty led directly to the Trail of Tears, the forced removal that killed thousands. Though many Treaty Party leaders were assassinated in 1839, Raven survived and made the journey west, settling in the Flint District of Indian Territory near present-day Stilwell.

There he rebuilt his life on a grand scale. He married four times to Sallie Copeland, Mary "Polly" Miller, Alcey (or Elsie) Vann, and Annie Vann and fathered 21 children. The 1851 Drennan Roll lists him with a large household that included children from each marriage: Ellen, Samuel, Rufus, Collins, Emily, and many others.

His eldest son, George Washington Adair, was born January 31, 1824, in Georgia to Andrew and Sallie. George grew up amid the upheaval of removal, married Maldreen Elizabeth Linder, and started his own family in the new territory.

Father and son worked the land side by side, bound by blood and the shared burdens of resettlement. But the bitterness of the treaty years never fully faded.

On September 10, 1853, at Starr Springs, a clear-water site near the Arkansas border then owned by the Starr family, Andrew and George were ambushed and killed. Known as the Adair Massacre, the murders were rooted in old grudges.

Some accounts trace them to lingering resentment against Treaty Party signers; others point to a personal feud years earlier when the Adairs had killed a man named Proctor.

Whatever the exact motive, a group of opponents carried out the attack. Cherokee authorities quickly captured the killers and executed them under tribal law.

Family tradition says father and son were laid to rest together in the Adair Cemetery, on land that by 1937 belonged to Rufus Ross. Today the cemetery stands abandoned, its few stones weathered and scattered, with no grand markers to tell their story.

Yet the Adair name lives on in Oklahoma. Adair County itself, created in 1907 from former Cherokee lands, honors later family members like William Penn Adair. Descendants helped shape the Cherokee Nation's recovery in Indian Territory, their roots running deep in the Flint District.

In this quiet, overgrown burial ground, the graves of Raven and George Adair remain a somber reminder of division's cost and of a people's enduring strength. Though nature has nearly erased the visible traces, the memory of a father and son cut down together still lingers in the Oklahoma soil.