It’s taken Carl Cranfill more than 15 years to save his family’s mausoleum. Within those years, Cranfill has gone to court, driven all over the country, and conducted hours of family history research, all to fulfill his great-grandfather’s wishes and to preserve a piece of family history. Looking at the fortress-inspired Miller Mausoleum today, it's clear that all his hard work has paid off.

Cranfill’s interest in the mausoleum goes back even further, to when he was a child living in Missouri in the 1960s. “My mom and I moved from California to Missouri, where she was from, in 1964,” says Cranfill. “My great-aunt, Elsie Henderson, was the daughter of Joseph M. Miller, who built the mausoleum in 1927 a mile from downtown Holden. She was the family historian, and she shared a lot of neat family stories about the Millers and about the mausoleum.” Henderson gave Cranfill her handwritten notes from her research as well as early family photographs. For five decades, Cranfill kept those resources, waiting for the day when he would be able to help preserve the mausoleum built by his great-grandfather.

“His parents made him promise that he would re-bury them in the mausoleum so they could be with him, and he kept that promise," says Cranfill. "His wife was buried next to him, as were several of his children.”

For about 70 years, the family believed that the mausoleum and the surrounding property was tied up in a trust with 18 relatives, including Cranfill, owning a parcel of the land. This made maintaining the mausoleum and grounds challenging, and vandalism became a common occurrence as early as the 1950s. Around 15 years ago, Cranfill retired and decided to finish his great-aunt’s research on the Millers and uncovered something shocking.

“I discovered that the property was never deeded to the trust. The assets were still in the name of my great-grandfather. That was an eye-opener.”

Finally, in the summer of 2016, Cranfill went to court (the last of several court appearances made by his family over the decades to break up the trust), and a judge ruled that the trust did not apply to the mausoleum. Cranfill became the sole owner of 120 acres and a concrete mausoleum that had water issues, cracks, roof problems, and structural failures.

That was the easy part. Then came the hard part. “I had to meet all 17 relatives who owned parcels of the property in person, to negotiate a deal with them. I drove all over the country. For nearly two years I did this,” he says. “But I’m an optimistic person. I don’t take no for an answer.”

Cranfill had four points he shared with his relatives, all laid out in a PowerPoint presentation. Firstly, he wanted to remove his family's remains from the decaying mausoleum, which was no longer a place of peaceful rest. (Some of the crypts had been broken into over the years, and water seeped into the mausoleum when it rained.) Secondly, he wanted to do all of the structural repairs based on an engineering report done on the building. Thirdly, Cranfill wanted to turn the property back into a community park that his great-grandfather had established. And lastly, he hoped to transfer the land and mausoleum to another entity like the county or a nonprofit to manage it.

Cranfill eventually received permission from his relatives to remove their ancestors from the mausoleum and rebury them in a local cemetery. One of his first tasks was to find an entity to take over the property. But everyone he approached turned him down, since it was such a big and expensive project. So Cranfill changed course. He sold 90 acres of land in early 2017 and the proceeds were used to stabilize the mausoleum’s foundation and the four pillars on the main elevation that were in a severe state of deterioration. He had a new roof installed and the cracks in the concrete repaired to prevent moisture intrusion. Cranfill also hired an architectural historian to write a nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, which was approved in January of 2018.

To raise awareness for the mausoleum and his grand plans for the property, Cranfill held an open house in June of 2018. He expected a few dozen people interested in what he was doing. Instead, more than 500 came out to see the mausoleum and hear Cranfill's vision for its future. "People showed up before I was supposed to start tours. I gave tours nonstop from 8:45 a.m. until 5 p.m. in the evening. For a small town with 2,000 people, it was shocking. Businesses in town were hopping."

Following the open house, Cranfill's vision seems to be getting closer and closer to realization. The second phase, after the preservation of the mausoleum was finished, is to focus on the grounds, which have been untouched for decades. "Miller let the community use the land as a park in his day. You could swim and fish in the lake, and people did until the laws changed in the '40s. But the pond was the most popular place in the area." After Miller died in 1938, a local group installed a playground with swings and a merry-go-round, and an outhouse.

While Cranfill still has more work to do—he plans to establish a youth camp among the untouched grassy farmland and nature trails that will wind through the wildlife preserve—he's well on his way to preserving the cherished mausoleum his great-grandfather labored over for so many years.

“Some people assumed that I buried my great-grandfather in the ground," Cranfill notes. "But I had an above-ground monument constructed in the cemetery. That's where he and his wife are buried.” After decades of reposing in a decaying mausoleum that had lost the grandeur it once had, Miller and his family can, once again, finally rest in peace.