Restores me to Somerset’s mountains of snow,
When you were but Jerry, and I was but Joe.”
Morgan Miller kept a tavern on Morgantown street, Uniontown, as early as 1830, and probably before that time. His house was a dingy frame structure, painted red, which time and storm made a dead red. The location was on the hill near the old Baptist church, in that day called “Prospect Hill.” At this old tavern many persons of the neighborhood were accustomed to spend their evenings in drinking and gossipping. Among its patrons were Philip Krishbaum, a stone cutter, and Abram Brown, a farmer. Krishbaum had some aptitude in making rhymes, a talent he found useful in his business of chiseling tomb-stones. After spending an hour or two, one evening, in alternate drinking and gossipping with his friend Brown, he rose from his chair and remarked that he must take a drink and go, as he had to finish some lettering on a tomb-stone. “Stay awhile,” said Brown, “and write an epitaph for my tomb-stone, and I will treat.” “Agreed,” said Krishbaum, who, taking up a pen, wrote this:
“Here lies the body of Abram Brown,
Who lived three miles from Uniontown.
The more he got, the more he craved,
Great God! can such a soul be saved!”
Brown paid for the drinks. Seeing that Krishbaum had made a success of the Brown epitaph, Miller, the landlord, requested him to write one for his tomb-stone, which he did, as follows:
“Here lies the body of Morgan Miller,
Who has drunk the whisky of many a ’stiller.