Sacred Ground: Burk Cemetery (No Business)
On the edge of a rock-laden mountain bench, just a stone’s throw from where Burk Branch empties into No Business Creek, are the graves of Lewis Burk and his wife, Mary Ann. They were buried here, near their home when they died 14 months apart in 1908 and 1909.
No Business Creek may have been most prominently settled by the Slaven family — descendants of Richard Harve Slaven — but this was Burk (or Burke) territory, too. A few hundred feet below the graves of Lewis and Mary Ann is Burk Branch. A few hundred yards above — straight up the steep incline leading out of the valley and onto the plateau lands above — is the cliff-lined butte known as Burk’s Knob.
The Burke family
Lewis Burk was the grandson of Jonathan Burke, the patriarch of the Big South Fork’s Burke family. Jonathan Burke moved to the Cumberland Plateau from Virginia as a kid with his parents, Benjamin Burke and Elizabeth Troxell.
The Burkes first settled in the Rock Creek area nearer to the Little South Fork of the Cumberland River than to the Big South Fork, then later moved from Kentucky to Tennessee and settled along the Big South Fork — along with members of the Hatfield and Blevins families.
Jonathan Burke married Nancy Cooper, and they had perhaps as many as 11 children, including some of the more colorful characters of the Big South Fork River settlements. Among them was Haden Burke, born 1828 in Rock Creek before the family moved to Big South Fork.
Haden Burke married Nancy Lewallen, the daughter of Scott County’s first sheriff, John Lewallen, and they had at least eight children — including Lewis, born in 1866. Haden Burke and his family lived on No Business Creek, where Burke Branch empties into the creek, and owned all the land between Dry Branch to the mouth of No Business Creek.
It was Jonathan Burke who owned the cabin at Duck Shoals, on the banks of the Big South Fork River between Parch Corn Creek and No Business Creek, where a Civil War skirmish occurred in May 1863. A Confederate raiding party had taken refuge in the cabin for the night, and the residence was surrounded by a number of the local Home Guard. In the resulting firefight, several Rebel soldiers were killed. Most of them were buried nearby, but the location of their graves isn’t known.
Ownership of the cabin is often misattributed to Peter Burke, the older brother of Haden Burke, who was living with his parents at the time. It has been written that the cabin held bad memories for the Burke family following that fateful night, and that hunters dug lead bullets out of the log walls for reuse.
Jonathan Burke died in 1875 and is buried at what is now Charit Creek Lodge. It was there that the family moved after the Duck Shoals Skirmish. Several members of his family — including his widow, Nancy, sons Peter and Haden, at least two of Lewis’s siblings, and other members of the family — left the Big South Fork for Oklahoma soon thereafter. The old family home stood vacant for a while and was later disassembled and moved to No Business Creek after being purchased by Francis Miller.
Lewis and Mary Ann Burk
The story of Lewis and Mary Ann Burk was one marked by tragedy.
Mary Ann Smith was born in 1863, the daughter of Andrew Jackson Smith and Malinda Terry. In 1879 she married Johnathan Blevins, the son of Armstead Blevins and grandson of Jonathan Blevins, the first permanent settler of Station Camp Creek. They had two children, and then he drowned in the Big South Fork River in 1885, not far from Station Camp crossing, at the age of 28.
Mary Ann remarried to Lewis Burk and they had four more children. But in May 1908 she died at the age of 44 and was buried at the family homeplace — which was also the homeplace where Haden Burke had lived — on No Business Creek.
The following year — on July 4, 1909 — Lewis Burk was killed in a train accident in Winfield at the age of 42. He was preparing to board the train on the Cincinnati-Southern Railroad to make the short trip to Oneida when the train moved unexpectedly. He was thrown beneath the train and killed instantly. He was buried alongside his wife on their property at No Business.
By that time, Lewis Burk’s younger brother, Isaac, had sold his land at the mouth of No Business Creek to Francis Miller and moved to Station Camp. Not only did Francis Miller move the old Jonathan Burke home to the property, but he also built a general store and a school. One of Francis Miller’s sons, Will Miller, married Ellen Burke, the daughter of Lewis and Mary Ann Burk.
Lewis Burk’s land was eventually purchased by Harve Slaven, a son of Nimrod Slaven and great-grandson of Richard Harve Slaven, the first permanent settler on No Business Creek, who lived there from the 1930s until he left Big South Fork Country in the 1950s.
Cemetery census
BURK CEMETERY (NO BUSINESS)
GPS Coordinates: 36.588508606, -84.658187866
First burial: 1908
Last burial: 1909
Burials since Robert Bailey’s 1994 cemetery census? No.
Lewis S. Burk 1866-1909
Mary Ann Burk 1863-1908
This story is part of the Scott County Cemetery Project.