T. A. Miller was Lumber Tycoon, Railroad Builder, Community Leader

Large areas of Dade and Lawrence counties to this day owe a debt to the vision of one man, if not for their very existence, then at least for their greater development.

Businessman Thomas Alexander Miller, better known as T. A. Miller, was engaged in the lumber trade at Greenfield in the 1880s when the dominant new technology of the era, the railroad, first came to Dade County.

The railroad arrived in the form of the Kansas City, Fort Scott & Memphis Railroad, also known as “The Gulf Line” for its stated goal of reaching the Gulf of Mexico – however, when the route through the county was announced, local leaders were understandably crestfallen: surveyors had chosen a route with easier grades through the creek valleys, bypassing the county seat at Greenfield by about 3 miles.

Being bypassed by the railroad was often a death sentence in those days, even for older, more established communities like Greenfield, which had seen settlers arrive in the 1830s and earlier. Entire towns had been known to be picked up and moved to new townsites nearer the tracks.

Speculators immediately jumped what they perceived as opportunity, and purchased several hundred acres of land just to the south of Greenfield, along where the railroad was to be constructed. They filed plats for a new town, with a post office named “Watkins,” complete with a square for what they saw as the inevitable relocation of the courthouse. The postal name was changed to “South Greenfield” in about 1891 and the community it served followed suit.

Not everyone in Greenfield felt the town was resigned to that fate, foremost among them T. A. Miller. Born in 1858 to a pioneer family on a farm near Greenfield, Miller had entered the lumber business in partnership with his brother-in-law, George Gilmore, in 1879, hauling product from the nearest railhead in Nevada, Mo., to Greenfield for sale. Buying out Gilmore’s share in 1880, Miller began doing business as the T.A. Miller Lumber Company, and had been elected to the board of aldermen in 1881.

In 1885, Miller had incorporated his firm, with a friend in Chicago, S. K. Martin, providing capital and serving as a silent partner. It was also in this year that Miller, together with a number of Greenfield citizens and $8,000 they had raised, obtained a charter for what was then called the “Greenfield Railroad Company,” which constructed a railway between Greenfield and a junction with the Gulf Line in the upstart community to the south. Despite a steep grade, the line proved successful, and efforts to remove the courthouse to the south fizzled. In 1888, efforts were made to extend the line to the north, to Stockton, and the charter was amended so that the line became known as the “Greenfield & Northern Railroad Company.” The extension to Stockton progressed less than a mile, owing to what a 1917 biographer called the “powerful opposition of large financial interests.” Instead, Miller looked south for expansion.

The Lawrence County seat of Mt. Vernon was craving rail access itself, as the St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad, better known as the “Frisco,” had been constructed through the southern portion of the county and the line was being pushed through the Indian Territory on toward the West and to Texas. Much like Greenfield, Mt. Vernon was an older, established community, but residents there feared what could happen if they, too, were bypassed by the railroad.

In 1889, after raising $23,000, the residents of Mt. Vernon convinced Miller and his backers to extend the Greenfield & Northern to the south. From South Greenfield, the line passed through the communities of Pennsboro and Olinger before passing near another burg then known as Murrell City, before entering Mt. Vernon from the north. The extension to Mt. Vernon was completed by the spring of 1890, and was celebrated with much fanfare in that community.

In those heady days, later known to history as the “Gay Nineties,” any respectable town of note wanted a second railroad as to provide competition for the first, and it was with this intent that the city of Aurora approached Miller with the prospect of extending the line even further south to the metropolis of southeast Lawrence County. In 1892, Miller met with a number of St. Louis-based financiers, who as a syndicate purchased about 84 percent of the Greenfield & Northern’s capital stock. Together with a $30,000 contribution from the city of Aurora, the Greenfield & Northern line was extended from Mt. Vernon through the new community (now practically a ghost town) of Elliott and into Aurora from the northwest to a connection with the Frisco.

In the 1917 biography of T. A. Miller, written as part of the book History of Dade County and Her People, the writer said of the extension of the G&N to Aurora that “It is a monument to the perseverance and energy of Mr. Miller that the road was built, and he was the promoter and builder and equipped and operated it for several years during which time the country was afflicted with financial panics and political agitation. It was a truly hazardous venture, and proved to be very costly both on his time and money but he performed a real service to the community.”

The 1890s were a time of market speculation and manipulation, with Wall Street financiers known as “the Robber Barons” treating railroad companies as playthings. Miller decided that after over 10 years as a railroad promoter it was time to make an exit from that business, and sold the G&N to the Gulf line in 1895, remaining in its employ for a further two years as a “commercial agent” before returning full time to the lumber business.

Miller had relocated to Aurora from Greenfield in 1892 and eventually expanded his firm to 10 lumberyards with timberlands and a sawmill in Arkansas, a finishing plant in Aurora, and a home coal distributorship based in the Aurora lumberyard dispensing to the other branches. Working in construction, Miller was the lead contractor in the construction of the Lawrence County Courthouse in Mt. Vernon, having prior constructed a major brick block of commercial buildings in Greenfield. He also constructed the first brick structure in the community of Miller, named in his honor, which had subsumed the earlier settlement of Murrell City.

In addition to his lumber interests, Miller was the principal shareholder and a director of the Bank of Bowers Mill and a director of the Majestic Milling Company (predecessor of MFA Milling Co. in Aurora). He served on the local school board for several years and was elected mayor of Aurora in 1915. Miller was also instrumental in the 1907 building of the first sewer system in Aurora, the “Peoples’ Sewer System.”

Miller had married Clara Belle Jopes at Greenfield on Feb. 14, 1884, and together they raised two daughters to adulthood, Mary Kate and Lois. Mary Kate Miller married Lewis Shaw Coleman, son of Miller’s lumber business rival, M. L. Coleman, and they had two children before her death in September 1918. Lois Miller married attorney Eugene McNatt, who for several years served as the Lawrence County prosecuting attorney. Miller was a Freemason, a member of the Elks Lodge, and his family were practicing Presbyterians.

The T. A. Miller Lumber Company continued as a going concern until the mid-1920s, when the virgin timber of the Arkansas timberlands finally played out, and those holdings were sold together with the sawmill during 1926-27. The remaining lumberyards were sold over the next several years. Locations where Miller is mentioned to have had operations at one time or another included Greenfield, Aurora, Bolivar, Ash Grove, Everton, South Greenfield, Miller, Mt. Vernon, Hoberg, LaRussell, Walnut Grove, Humansville, and, briefly, at Weaubleu in 1898. In addition to the retail lumber operations, there was also the Aurora finishing mill, the DeSoto, Ark., sawmill, and the timberlands in and around Marion County, Ark.

Thomas Alexander Miller died May 27, 1936, at the age of 77, and was buried in Maple Park Cemetery in Aurora.

The railroad he founded carried on but began to be cut back at about the same time as Miller’s death, however, the original portion between Greenfield and South Greenfield remains in operation today. More on that will come in a follow-up story.