Stephen W. Miles, born in New York, came to this area in 1819, became a successful businessman, and acquired more than 2800 acres, with his stately home on the floodplain below the bluff in the community of Eagle Cliff. The blufftop had long been used by Native Americans as a burial site and held special significance for the Native Americans who once lived in this region. The cemetery’s more modern section contains more than 400 burials, including many early Monroe County settlers and Revolutionary War veterans, among them Shadrach Bond, uncle of the first Illinois governor of the same name, James Garretson, and John Casper Moredock, for whom Moredock Lake was named. Miles commissioned a mausoleum and burial vault for his family, built with Italian marble brought up the Mississippi River by steamboat and hauled up the bluff by oxen. The burial chamber contained 56 vaults, 24 on each side and 8 on the back wall, and the mausoleum cost $25,000. Those buried there included Miles, his two wives, several descendants, and some of his servants, including Annie. Miles died in 1858, three months before the structure was completed. Large marble panels beside the doorway identified it as a memorial to Miles and his descendants, placed its care on the eldest living family heir, and a wrought iron fence surrounded it. By the early 1960s, vandals had broken open the mausoleum and destroyed the contents of the vaults inside, and it survives through cleanup, restoration, and maintenance by dedicated volunteer cemetery board members. Buried here are veterans of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War, as well as county commissioners and Steven Miles, Jr., of the U. S. Secret Service.