Driving Route 89 in the Town of Butler, and passing by the historic marker of Sarah Mills burial site, one wonders – What is Sarah’s story of some 65 years? How did she happen to come tothis area that would be named Butler in some twenty years?  Where did Sarah’s family go? This lonely gravesite does bring to the viewer the sense of love, care and devotion, but also the sense of loss and hardship of the early pioneer settlers.  

“… shortly after 1800, about 1804, they say, … the first permanent white settler built his log house about two miles a little west of north from the four corners in what is now South Butler (the intersection of State Route 89 and S. Butler-Conquest Road). His name was Peter Mills, a former captain in the Revolutionary army and his land, a block of 500 acres deeded to him by the government for military service lay just to the southwest of the geographical center of the township. He had two other five hundred acre blocks elsewhere but chose to settle on this one.”

“In 1809, his wife Sarah died and was buried on a little knoll perhaps 30 or 40 rods to the north of their home. She is thought to be the first white woman to die within the limits of the future township [Butler]. He placed a sizable slab of local stone, home inscribed with the data(sic?), on her grave and went his way. There are no other known burials on the site."

Captain Mills left the area after Sarah’s death. He died in 1830 in Washington D.C. at the age of 88/89.