In less than a minute, on a market Saturday, two men were dead — and the woman both of them loved would carry the county’s verdict for the rest of her life.
From the family record
George M. Moore·John A. Tennis·Louisa E. Davis Moore
The newspapers told it in a column. The family trees, in the century since, have told it by omission — her name, cut out of records that kept everybody else’s.
The book
Mt. Vernon, Missouri. April 25, 1885. On a market Saturday, in front of half the county, two men met on the south side of the public square. One was a farmer who had never been known to miss. The other was a merchant who had never been known to stop talking. In less than a minute, both were dead — and the woman both men loved would carry the county’s verdict for the rest of her life.
What the Hills Keep goes back to where the whole of it rose, the way you walk a creek up to its spring — to 1838, when the first Moore rode into Lawrence County and chose his ground; to a benefit concert where a quiet man watched a girl sing; to a wedding, a store, a storm, a bottle of cordial sold in all kindness; and to the slow, ordinary, catastrophic years by which good people arrive at a minute nobody can take back.
Drawn from newspapers, county records, and the stones themselves, this is a novel about what a place remembers, what a family buries — and what the hills keep.
Length
126,000 words
Chapters
Forty-six
Years covered
1838–1885
Status
Finished; with agents
How it opens
You cannot ditch a spring.
Chapter One · The Spring
The hills of Lawrence County were old before any white man put his name to the land, and they would be old long after the last of those names had worn from the stones. In the autumn of 1838 the timber ran thick on the western ridges, and the limestone broke through wherever the ground rose steeply, and the springs came cold and clear out of the rock as they always had and always would, indifferent to the business of settlers and their hopes.
John Williams Moore rode into Lawrence County in the fall of 1838, twenty-three years old and alone, on a horse that had carried him eight hundred miles out of Hawkins County, East Tennessee. He had come with a saddlebag, a bedroll, and an intention, which was less equipment than most men brought into the Ozarks and turned out to be as much as he needed. John Moore did not waste motion, and he did not waste words, and of the two economies he was prouder of the second.
He found the spring on a Tuesday. He stood there a long time — a man with everything he owned on the horse behind him — and he looked at the spring and he thought: here.
Two days married, he brought Harriet out to show her what she had agreed to, and stopped her on the limestone shelf above the spring. She looked at the spring. She looked at the long slope above it, at the timber to the north and east. She looked at the sky.
“This is it,” he said.
“I gathered,” she said.
“Good water. That slope above it faces south. Timber’s close but not so close it’ll shade the fields.”
She was quiet a moment. “It’s a right smart way from town.”
“Two miles from the square.”
“That’s a long way in February, John.”
“Hit ain’t February,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Hit’s October.” She looked at the spring again — the clear cold run of it over the limestone, how it widened into a small basin before it found its course through the lower grass. “It’s a good spring,” she said finally.
“Best I’ve seen in the county.”
“Then I reckon we’d better get the wagon,” she said.
The Big Spring at Mount Vernon, this summer. Not the Moore spring — that one is on their own ground, three miles west — but the same limestone, the same country, and the water Samuel Williams once shot a deer beside. The Moores farmed in what the county papers called the Big Spring neighborhood.
Forty-six years later that lesson — you cannot ditch a spring; raise your ground and let the water run — passes to his son on the morning George marries Louisa Davis.
Meet the residents
The novel has forty-six chapters. The graveyard has hundreds.
Everyone in What the Hills Keep is buried within a few miles of where they were born, most of them in one small cemetery on a rise west of Mount Vernon. Some of them have a chapter. All of them have a stone, and a record, and a story that took some digging.
These are the ones written up so far.
Keep in touch
There is a good deal more of this coming.
New residents go up as they are written — there are hundreds still in the ground and only a few of them told. What the Hills Keep is finished and out with agents now. Publishing takes the time it takes, and if that road doesn't open the book will be printed anyway; either way there is no date to give you yet, and we would rather say so than invent one.
Leave your name and you will hear it first — the day a new resident goes up, and the day there is finally a date. Nothing in between. No money changes hands here, and there is no list but this one.
Nearly there — send the message.
This sends an email from your own mail program, so nothing you type is stored on this page or anywhere else on the web. Your name and address go straight to the author, and are not sold, shared, or added to any other list. Ask to come off it at any time and you will be.
On the byline
Why the book is signed “A Friend.”
George M. Moore, Louisa E. Davis Moore, and John A. Tennis were real people. The public events in this novel — the fair premiums, the tornado, the store, the suit, the square — come from county newspapers, census returns, marriage and probate records, and the gravestones themselves. The private conversation, the motive, and the feeling are the author’s, and one invention of a different order is identified plainly in a note at the back of the book.
The byline is borrowed. Somewhere in the county papers of these years, an anonymous mourner paid public tribute to one of the people in this book, would not give a name, and signed only A Friend. Whose tribute that was — and why a novel should be signed the same way — is the last thing the book has to say.
Louisa’s descendants cut her out of family trees that kept everybody else. This is her restoration, and it seemed right that it be signed from the place that mourner stood.
— A Friend
Samuel Smith Williams
January 1, 1805 – March 8, 1875 · Williams Graveyard
Samuel Smith Williams and Elizabeth Cocke Williams. The plate is scratched and pitted with age; both sat very still for a long exposure.
In late October of 1831, a group of settlers out of Maury County, Tennessee, made their way into the wilderness of southwest Missouri. They had come a long way already. Somewhere near the eastern edge of what would become Lawrence County, some of them lost their nerve and turned back.
Samuel S. Williams did not. He was twenty-six, traveling with his young wife Elizabeth and his parents, John and Abigail. When the others turned around, Samuel and his father kept going, and settled three and a half miles southeast of what would become Mount Vernon.
The creek the discouraged settlers retreated along still carries the name they gave it that day. It is called Turnback Creek, and you can find it on a map right now.
By 1833 he had moved his family three miles west of Mount Vernon and built a house that became a gathering place — open for church services, for community meetings, for the ordinary neighborly business by which a county gets assembled out of nothing. When the Missouri Legislature created Lawrence County on February 14, 1845, carving it out of Barry and Dade, Samuel S. Williams became its first County Clerk. There was no institution yet. He was part of what made one.
The court house at Mount Vernon, from a period engraving. Samuel Williams was the county's first clerk; the records his office started are still the reason most of these people can be found at all.
That is the founding as the county has always told it. Here is the rest of it.
The household Samuel came west with in 1831 — his father's — brought eight to ten enslaved people from Tennessee. Long afterward, when the old Williams homestead was being prepared for building, foundation stones were uncovered that are believed to be cabins Judge Williams put up for them shortly after the family arrived. Some of those people are said to be buried at Roberts Cemetery, east of the homestead and the oldest burying ground in the county, in graves thought to be unmarked. No record of their names has been found.
Samuel is under cut stone with his dates on it. So is his wife, and so are the children who died small. The difference between those two facts is not an accident of record-keeping. It is the record doing exactly what it was built to do, and it is the reason this project exists.
Williams Graveyard was established around 1843 on land tied to the Williams settlement. He helped make it. He died on the evening of March 9, 1875, at seventy, and was buried in the ground he had helped set aside. Elizabeth outlived him by sixteen years. Several of their children and grandchildren are here too, including four who did not reach their fourth birthday.
Elizabeth's stone, carved with an open book. She outlived him by sixteen years, and the lettering has nearly gone back into the limestone.
The county paper gave his death a few lines — one of the first settlers of Lawrence County, and a man who in an early day had shot a very large deer at the Big Spring, a quarter mile west of town — and then asked whether somebody who had known him well would send in a biographical sketch. Somebody did, and did it properly. He “departed this life on Tuesday, March 9th, 1875, at nine o'clock P. M., aged 70 years 2 months and 8 days.” He was born in Maury county, Tennessee, and “lived there until after he was married,” and came out to “the wilds of Southwest Missouri” in November of 1831, where he “settled and improved a large farm on which he resided up to the time of his death.” Thirty-six years in the Cumberland Presbyterian church. Several positions of trust. Before he was this county's first clerk he had been the first Assessor of Southwest Missouri.
The Big Spring, west of Mount Vernon, in the summer of 2026. It comes cold out from under the rock, runs over the ledges, and widens into the basin below. This is the water the notice meant.
Then it says the hard part. He had been in poor health for a number of years, and the August before he died his eyesight “commenced failing him very rapidly and continued so until his death.” The writer is plain about what that did to him: “The depreciation of his sight combined with other diseases, caused him great uneasiness of mind, which terminated with his death.” He had assessed this country and kept its records, and at the end he could not see it.
The stone you see there today was not raised by anyone who knew him. It went up in 1971, nearly a century after his death, put there by people who had only heard of him and thought he ought to be marked anyway. It reads, in part: Became First Lawrence County Clerk in 1845.
Two families, one row
The two families were already tied together before either left Tennessee. When Samuel married Elizabeth Cocke in January 1827, the marriage bond was signed by a William Moore standing surety — four years before anybody rode for Missouri. Judge Williams’s sister Elizabeth then married a Moore, which made the Moores his nephews and Samuel their first cousin. The Moore household held no one. Two of its sons went to war for the Union — one for three years in the 15th Missouri Cavalry, the other in the Home Guards. In this cemetery the two families lie in adjoining plots: Samuel and Elizabeth Williams in the twelfth, the Moores and Lebows in the eleventh, close enough to touch.
Sources
Headstone, Williams Graveyard, erected 1971. Reads: “Samuel S. Williams, Jan. 1, 1805 – Mar. 8, 1875. Came with his wife Elizabeth Cocke Williams and parents John Williams and Abigail Smith Williams from Maury County, Tenn. 1831. Became First Lawrence County Clerk in 1845.”
Biography of Judge John Williams, RootsWeb — sites.rootsweb.com/~molawre2/bio/WILLIAMS.html. The 1831 settler party, the Turnback Creek naming, and the enslaved people brought from Tennessee.
Fred Mieswinkel, 1974, article on the Williams family. Corroborates the eight to ten enslaved people. Publication and exact date still to be pulled.
“Williams Homestead Sold,” newsletter account. The only source for the cabin foundation stones and the Roberts Cemetery burials, and a secondary one. Publication, date and author still to be pulled.
County history, 1931. An independent telling of the Turnback Creek origin: the accompanying families “all became disheartened and turned back except Mr. Williams and his son, whereupon the creek was called Turnback.”
Lawrence County government, county history — lawrencecountymo.org/history. County created Feb. 14, 1845 out of Barry and Dade.
Death notice and obituary, county paper, March 1875. Two items: a short notice asking readers for a biographical sketch, and the obituary that answered it, which is the source for the hour of his death, his exact age, the thirty-six years in the Cumberland Presbyterian church, the first Assessor of Southwest Missouri, and the failing sight. Held as photographs; the paper, date and page still need to be recorded.
Tennessee marriage bond, dated Jan. 9, 1827. Principals Samuel Williams and William Moore as surety, a bond of $1,250. The memoir gives the wedding as Jan. 11, so the two documents corroborate each other to the day. The county and the bride's name are too faded to read; a higher-resolution scan might recover them.
Williams Graveyard plot survey, plots 10–12. Places Samuel and Elizabeth in plot 12, the Moore and Lebow graves in plot 11.
Where the record disagrees
His stone gives March 8, 1875. The obituary gives Tuesday, March 9th, at nine in the evening, aged 70 years 2 months and 8 days — and that date checks out twice over: March 9, 1875 did fall on a Tuesday, and counting 70 years, 2 months and 8 days from his birth on January 1, 1805 lands on March 9 exactly. The obituary was written within days by somebody who knew him. The stone was cut in 1971, ninety-six years later. This page follows the obituary.
Gaps in the record
No FindAGrave memorial has been located for Samuel; the cemetery listing is at findagrave.com/cemetery/32303. The two 1875 clippings above are held as photographs and still need their paper, date and page recorded before anyone could look them up. If you have anything on the people buried at Roberts, we would like to hear from you.
John Williams Moore Sr.
February 12, 1815 – December 24, 1895 · Williams Graveyard
No photograph found yet
He came into the world the year after the War of 1812 ended — a war his father fought in and did not long survive. He left it the year before the Spanish-American War began. In between he watched a frontier become a state, lived through a civil war, and outlasted most of what he had built.
In 1838, at twenty-three, John Moore got on a horse and rode eight hundred miles alone, out of Hawkins County in East Tennessee to Springfield, Missouri. His uncle, a man named John Williams, had been among the first settlers on the river that now carries the Williams name — the river this graveyard sits beside. John rode straight to his uncle's house. Then he went out looking at ground, bought a claim, built a log cabin, cleared it himself, and put in his first crop of corn in 1839.
He kept the seed from that first crop and replanted from it every year after. The corn took first premium at the county fair every time it was entered.
In August of 1840 he married Harriet Rachel Lebow, whose people had made the same long journey out of Tennessee. They married four miles north of Mount Vernon — not back east, as the family later remembered it, but here, as settlers in new country, with nothing yet built.
They had twelve children. By 1888 there were eighty-one descendants: nine children living, sixty grandchildren, twelve great-grandchildren. Before the war he was one of the largest stock dealers in the county and one of its wealthier men. The war took most of it — rebel soldiers, Union soldiers, and bushwhackers all helped themselves in turn to his livestock and his household goods.
One detail from the 1888 account has stayed with us. During the war, Harriet hid two beehives up in the garret to keep them from the soldiers. Nearly twenty-five years later, when the history was written down, one of those swarms was still up there making honey.
His mother was Elizabeth Williams, sister to Judge John Williams, whose household had brought eight to ten enslaved people out of Tennessee and settled the county three years ahead of him. That made John a Williams nephew and a first cousin to Samuel, and it means he grew up connected by blood to the largest slaveholding family in the county. His own household held no one. When the war came, his son Gallahugh served three years in the Union Army and his son Jacob in the Home Guards, and rebel soldiers, Union soldiers, and bushwhackers all robbed the place in turn.
The family has carried a story for generations that the Moores did more than decline to participate — that a house on their ground had a room built into it big enough to hide a family, and that people moving north came through. No one has proved it. As one of his descendants puts it, that was the point: helping someone escape was a felony, so unless you were caught there is no record. It is a family theory, honestly held and honestly labeled, and we would rather say so than dress it up.
He was a Cumberland Presbyterian elder from 1847. He never used tobacco or whiskey. He died on Christmas Eve, 1895, and Harriet outlived him by twelve years. His name is on the headstone. So is hers.
In the novel
This is the man Chapter One opens on — the ride, the spring, the first crop of corn. The advice he gives his son on a wedding morning fifty years later is what the whole book turns on: you cannot ditch a spring. Raise your ground instead.
Sources
Goodspeed, History of Lawrence County, Missouri, 1888; transcribed on RootsWeb. The eight hundred miles on horseback, the 1839 crop, the twelve children and eighty-one descendants, the war losses to both armies and to bushwhackers, the beehives in the garret, and the Cumberland Presbyterian eldership from 1847.
Lawrence County Record and the Lawrence Chieftain, Aug. 30, 1894, p. 2. The fifty-fourth anniversary gathering, at which John gave his own account: born East Tennessee Feb. 12, 1815; came to Lawrence County in 1838; built a cabin and raised a crop in 1839; married Harriet R. Lebow Aug. 25, 1840, four miles north of Mount Vernon.
Military service. Gallahugh Blackburn Moore, Sergeant, Co. B, 15th Missouri Cavalry, three years. Jacob Greenfield Moore, Home Guards.
Oral history recording with a Moore descendant, 2026. The hidden room and the escape route are from this recording alone. The speaker states plainly that there is no proof, and we present it as family tradition, not as history.
Gaps in the record
John Sr. does not appear in the 2004 cemetery transcription, so his exact plot is unconfirmed even though the family stone carries his name. The claim that the Moore household held no enslaved people rests on family knowledge and the absence of any listing; it has not yet been checked against the 1850 and 1860 federal slave schedules, which would settle it either way.
Harriet Rachel Lebow Moore
June 19, 1823 – September 1907 · Williams Graveyard
The Moore family gathered at the homestead west of Mount Vernon. Counting themselves, they numbered eighty-seven at the golden wedding in 1890 and a hundred and fourteen four years later.
At the Lawrence County fair in the fall of 1869, Harriet Moore took premiums for the best butter, the best mixed jeans, the best linsey, corn bread, wheat bread, sweet pickles, and pears. Seven prizes in an afternoon. She was forty-six, and she had been working that ground for close to thirty years.
She was born in East Tennessee in June of 1823. John Moore came out to Lawrence County ahead of everyone, in 1838, and had a cabin and a crop before he had a wife. They married four miles north of Mount Vernon on August 25, 1840. She was seventeen. Whatever they were going to have, they were going to have to make it there.
They raised twelve children, ten of whom lived to be grown. And they became a family the county gathered around. In June of 1884, a hundred and two people turned out at the Moore place for her sixty-first birthday dinner. A third of them were children. The newspaper's account of the day is mostly about the leftovers, and about how Bill Baugh and Claron Etter took it upon themselves to finish them.
At the golden wedding in 1890, a hundred and twenty-five guests came. The children gave John a gold-headed cane and Harriet a pair of gold-bowed spectacles.
John died on Christmas Eve, 1895. The birthday dinners kept on — the neighbors came again the following June, and the June after that. Harriet died at her home four miles west of Mount Vernon in September 1907, and was buried, in the words of the paper, at the family burial ground near her home. That is this place.
The other gathering. One of these two photographs is the golden wedding of 1890 and the other the fifty-fourth anniversary in 1894; the sleeves date both after 1888. Note the man who climbed the tree to get in the picture.
The record cannot agree on the day she died. FindAGrave says September 11. The Peirce City Journal says Wednesday evening, September 25. Both dates fell on a Wednesday that year, so that settles nothing. Her stone would settle it, if the stone is still legible.
In the novel
She is standing on the limestone shelf above the spring in the opening chapter, being shown what she has agreed to. “That’s a long way in February, John.” “Hit ain’t February.” “No. Hit’s October.”
Sources
Fountain and Journal, Oct. 28, 1869, p. 1, premium list for the Mount Vernon fair, list dated Oct. 10. Mrs. Harriet R. Moore took best butter, mixed jeans, linsey, corn bread, wheat bread, sweet pickles, and pears. The jeans and linsey are cloth she wove herself.
Fountain and Journal, Jun. 26, 1884, p. 3, “Tete champetre or Birthday Dinner.” The gathering on the 17th for her sixty-first birthday; the bell rang at 11:40; a hundred and two people fed, about a third of them children; Bill Baugh and Claron Etter finishing the leftovers. Signed “A Spectator.”
Lawrence County Record and the Lawrence Chieftain, Aug. 28, 1890, p. 3, “Golden Wedding.” A hundred and twenty-five present; the gold-headed cane and the gold-bowed spectacles; a family of eighty-seven persons.
Lawrence County Record and the Lawrence Chieftain, Aug. 30, 1894, p. 2. The fifty-fourth anniversary; a hundred and fourteen descendants.
Fountain and Journal, Jun. 25, 1896, p. 3. Her seventy-second birthday dinner, the first after John's death six months earlier.
Stotts City Sunbeam, Mar. 6, 1903, p. 3. “Mrs. John Moore” very low with la grippe at the home of her son Will. She recovered and lived four more years.
The Peirce City Journal, Oct. 3, 1907, p. 1. Her death at home four miles west of Mount Vernon, and burial “at the family burial ground near her home.”
Where the record disagrees
Seven sources give seven readings of her age. June 19 is constant in every one; only the year moves. FindAGrave and the 1884 birthday account imply 1823; the 1894 and 1896 accounts imply 1824; the 1907 obituary implies 1822; a 1903 note implies 1820 or 1821. This page uses 1823. The death date is likewise unsettled — FindAGrave says Sept. 11, the Peirce City Journal says Wednesday evening, Sept. 25, and both dates fell on a Wednesday. We say “September 1907” because we do not know. Her stone would settle it if it is still legible.