The Life of KATHARINE DEVEREUX (BAKER) MILLER
Katharine Devereux Miller – known as Kate – was the daughter of Henry Watkins Miller (1814-1862) and Frances Johnson Devereux (1816-1881). When Henry married Frances on June 15, 1837, it drew him and any offspring into a wealthy and powerful amalgam of antebellum planter aristocracy in North Carolina, something out of Gone With the Wind. Kate was a niece of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, her mother’s sister, and is mentioned often and fondly in that woman’s diary, published as Journal of a Secesh Lady.
Henry Miller was a Virginian who had come to Raleigh at twelve. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1834), he went into law and politics, originally as a Whig. With civil conflict on the horizon, however, he joined the Democratic Party as a Unionist, but as with so many other Tar Heels, Lincoln’s call for troops to put down rebellious southern states drove him into the secessionist camp. He abandoned a campaign for a seat in the US Congress and in 1862 ran instead for a place in the Confederate House. Voters gave him the nod, but he died in September of that same year before he could take his seat in Richmond. “Thus has perished one of the finest minds & the most finished scholars in our country,” wrote Catherine Edmonston.
Henry left behind wife Frances and three children, Kate, George and Henry, who at 21 had married in 1861. Against the advice of sister Catherine, in November 1862, Frances opened a boarding house in Raleigh at New Bern Avenue and Person Street, a lodging that often attracted government men. “And so soon after her husband’s death,” huffed Catherine. “I can neither comprehend or have any patience with it – this pretense of Independence….”
If Frances Miller distressed the Secesh Lady, Catherine’s niece Kate only amused her. Spirited, principled, sincere, “truthful as the day,” Kate often visited her aunt at one her several plantation homes in Northampton County, sometimes taking the Raleigh & Gaston train to Weldon, where she would be met. She apparently said whatever came to mind and, when angry, simply went to her room and sang to herself; composed, she could again join others.
On April 15, 1863, Kate married Captain George B. Baker, CSA, at Christ Church in Raleigh, the Reverend Richard Sharp Mason doing the honors. Catherine Edmondston did not attend but recorded the wedding details as reported to her. Wartime scarcity demanded creative substitutions for a proper wedding: Linen sheets and hand-me-down underclothes were the basis of Kate’s wedding dress, while “Confederate Raisins” (dried peaches clipped with shears) sweetened a cake. The diarist found her niece’s wedding attire “fit…for war & for a soldiers [sic] wife.”
A soldier’s wife she was. From Cumberland County, George Baker had enlisted as a private in Company F, 1st North Carolina Volunteers, later served with the 36th Regiment, and was appointed a 2nd Lieutenant with the 3rd Regiment State Troops. Apparently wounded at Malvern Hill in July 1862, Captain Baker became quartermaster at Camp Holmes, a training facility near Raleigh. Baker survived the War, but war did find its way to Frances Miller’s door as the capital filled with retreating Confederate troops in 1865 after Bentonville, and she worked to feed the soldiers at Christ Church; these were followed by Sherman’s army of occupation, 90,000 strong.
With the end of the conflict, George and Kate Baker went to Fayetteville in Baker’s Cumberland County to live. Their time together was short, however, for he died in 1872 and was interred in Oakwood Cemetery, his stone carved by Cayton & Wolfe (WO [William Oliver] Wolf[e], the father of author Thomas Wolfe and the model for the notorious stonecutter “WO Gant” in son Wolfe’s books). Kate remarried four years later, to Thomas Munro Argo (1844-1909), a prominent attorney in the capital. While “bored by the frivolity of society,” Argo apparently did try to please his new wife by building her a grand house just north of the city on what is now Lafayette Street. Alas, Kate’s death in 1886 brought work on the house to a halt, for a time leaving the place a shell, dubbed “Argo’s Folly” -- an unhappy ending to the story of a woman who had known the vicissitudes of wartime North Carolina. Katharine’s stone sits between those of her two husbands, with both the men’s names on her marker.
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