Esther Post Butler, born in Connecticut on September 15, 1795, married Dr. Elizur Butler, a physician and minister, in October 1820. Sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Butlers served at Brainerd, then Creek Path, and arrived at the Haweis Mission near Rome in 1826. Esther Butler died in 1829 after eight years of service to the Cherokees. In 1831, Dr. Butler was arrested for residing in the Cherokee Nation without taking an oath of allegiance to the State of Georgia and obtaining a license from the governor. Sentenced with Samuel Worcester to four years of hard labor in the state penitentiary at Milledgeville, he was pardoned by Governor Wilson Lumpkin in 1833, almost a year after the United States Supreme Court nullified the law under which the missionaries had been arrested. After his release, he returned to the Haweis Mission but was forced to move the following year. He later attended the Cherokees during the Removal and served at Red Clay, Park Hill, Fairfield, and the Cherokee Female Seminary before his death in Arkansas in 1857.