In the early 1830s, settlers in this area cleared land and built their first homes of logs. This cabin was built about 1850 by Reuben Rice Kirkland, who lived there with his first wife and their ten children. At one time it had an additional bedroom and chimney on the right side, the back porch was enclosed for cooking and eating, a small log kitchen stood a few feet behind it and was later converted into a smokehouse, and a milk house beside the well stood on stilts to protect butter and milk from animals. In 1981, the Bullock Historical Society moved the cabin from Stills Cross Roads in southern Bullock County into Union Springs and restored it as a museum. In 1849, Micajah Norfleet Eley donated land for the Baptist Church and an adjoining public cemetery, the oldest cemetery in Union Springs, which served the city for 35 years. Known locally as the Confederate Cemetery, it includes the tombstones of about twenty-two Confederate soldiers. The Confederate Monument now at the center of the cemetery was unveiled by the Ladies Memorial Association at the intersection of Prairie and Hardaway Streets on March 29, 1895, and was moved to its present location in 1973. Below the Confederate soldiers’ grave site stands a marker reading, “Union Prisoners of War, 1861–1865, Victims of Plague.”