Miller's Spring

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way up in Grayson County, there's a spring with a story worth stopping for. On October the fifteenth, 1866, a man named J.

K. Miller bought the homesite where this spring sat quiet and steady, waiting to do some good. Miller was born in 1826 and lived all the way to 1908, and if you want to understand the kind of man he was, just look at what that spring meant to the people around him.

It supplied his household, sure. But it also supplied his neighbors. And travelers coming through on the nearby ferry road, strangers passing by, they drank from it too.

That spring didn't play favorites. Now, the spring alone would make a fine story. But J.

K. Miller wasn't finished. This was a civic-minded man, and Grayson County was going to know it.

He gave alternate business area lots to the city of Denison. He gave sites for each of the early churches. He gave the site for the first public school.

He gave Forest Park. The man was practically handing the future of Denison out of his own pockets, lot by lot, acre by acre. Some folks build a town by hammer and nail.

J. K. Miller built his with open hands.

And it all started, in a way, with a spring on a piece of land he bought on an October afternoon in 1866.

What the marker says

On homesite bought Oct. 15, 1866, by J. K. Miller (1826-1908), this spring supplied his household, neighbors, travelers on nearby ferry road. Civic -minded Miller gave alternate business area lots to the city of Denison; also sites for each early church, first public school, Forest Park.