Miller - William - Montgomery InGenWeb Project

William Miller, the subject of this sketch, was born in Pennsylvania, near Pittsburg, July 10th, 1791. His father, Mathew Miller, was a native of Scotland, who, after serving a term in the English Navy and being discharged, immigrated to this country and settled in Virginia. He served in the Revolutionary War as a private soldier and was twice wounded. In 1789 he immigrated to Pennsylvania and was married to a lady of German descent, by whom he had seven children, William, being the oldest. In 1801, he removed to Kentucky, where, twelve years afterwards, he died.

In August, 1812, William Miller entered the United States army as a volunteer and was elected to the office of sergeant. The regiment was organized at Georgetown, Ky., and began its march for the northern frontier. There was then no means whatever for the transportation of armies except by hard marches, and much of the distance was a dense forest, through which the army had to cut its own roads. The soldiers had to furnish their own clothing, blankets and knapsacks—the government furnishing only arms, ammunition and tents.

The line of march lay through Cincinnati, Dayton, Piqua, Ft. Wayne, and Ft. Meigs. At the last named point, Gen. Winchester, having command, ordered an advance on Frenchtown, a small village near the river Rasin, in Michigan. The order was ill advised, embracing only four regiments, and had no other object than the personal advancement of the commanding officer.

Disaster was the inevitable result. The army advanced to Frenchtown, (the place is now called Monroe, and is located 50 miles north of Toledo, near the lake,) where it met a body of British and Indians, on the 18th of Jan. 1813. The British retreated, but being heavily reinforced from Canada, returned on the 22nd and compelled the American force to surrender after a short battle of six hours.

The subject of this sketch went though these two battles without a scratch, but lost his blanket, knapsack, and clothing, except what he had on.

From this point he experienced the hardest features of his military services; for the prisoners were marched to Fort Niagara, before being paroled, a distance of 200 miles through a deep snow and intense cold. At night their bivouac was a waste house, barn or an open forest.

The pay of the soldiers at that time was $5 per month for the first two months and after that $8 per month.

Mr. Miller reached his home in Bath County, Ky., in April 1813, where shortly afterward he was married to Casandrew Ross.

Mr. Miller was engaged in farm work and stone masonry in Kentucky until 1835, when he removed with his family to this county.

He purchased for one thousand silver dollars 160 acres of land in the eastern part of this township where he lived until his death in 1872. In 1836 he built a house and barn which are still standing.

In politics he was first a Whig, voting for J. Q. Adams, Clay, Harrison, Taylor, and Scott, but in 1854 when the Whig party was broken up he became a Democrat, voting for Buchanan, Douglas, McClellan and Seymour.

He had an abiding faith in the Christian religion and was a member of the regular predestined Baptist Church, his membership, and that of his companion, being with Sugar Creek Church at Crawfordsville, where he served as deacon for thirty years.

His occupation was that of farming; and he made one trip to Chicago with a wagon load of wheat for which he received 55 cents per bushel.

Among the men who served with him in the army were Wm E. Bratton, grandfather of Trustee Bratton and the father of Rev. Thomas Hamilton. William Heath served at the same time but in a different regiment; so that they met only once while in the service. He received land warrants for 160 acres government land and for the last three years of his life a pension of $8 per month. As a result of the hard marches and terrible exposure which he underwent, he became a sufferer from sciatic rheumatism, which gradually grew more intensely painful until his death in September 1872.