Miller Community

The Miller Community, also known as Jenks Branch, was five miles southeast of Liberty Hill in western Williamson County. It was established by Milas, Richard, and Nelson Miller, brothers who moved to Texas from South Carolina soon after the Civil War. Other families, many of them former slaves, settled there as well. Milas Miller built a brush arbor for use as both a school and church. Liberty Chapel, which was part of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was later built west of the brush arbor. A lodge established by the Independent American Knights of Liberty also served as a community center. In 1903 the Miller school had forty-nine students and one teacher. The lodge building was torn down in 1913. During the late 1930s a school, two churches, and a few scattered houses marked the community on county highway maps. The Miller school was consolidated with the Liberty Hill district in 1949. By the late 1980s only a cemetery and a shotgun house marked the community site. The land, which had remained in the Miller family, was sold for taxes in 1989.