The Miller House on Cougill Road

 Middletown, VA

I put the name of the road in the title of the post because Miller House is a common place name, plus I have forgotten the name of the road several times when I was trying to find this historic site. It is mentioned in written accounts of the Battle of Cedar Creek (1864). This property is on the corner of Mineral Road and faces a railroad track.

The property was recently acquired by the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, which will preserve it and possibly open it for tours. 

I’ve written about this place before (see the 2009 post about it). The ruins that are close to the road are sometimes referred to as a mill, but they are actually the ruins of a smaller house that was styled similar to the one that still stands. I photographed the smaller house in 1997, and it was still standing, but just barely. I suspect it predated the larger house, but I don’t know when they were built. 

I saw a photo of a lovely painting by artist John Chumley of the smaller house. I’ve seen an exhibit of Chumley’s work (see this post). He died in 1984.

I’ll spare you my rant about how the park service and others keep calling the ruins a mill when it was actually a brick house. Instead, allow me to complain about the update I just downloaded today on my iPad, OS 26.2. Things look different and I’m getting too stubborn to deal with changes all the time! The Photos app doesn’t have the parallax correction in the same way and I’m going to have to view a video to find out how to straighten lines. This probably doesn’t matter to most people, but I tend to take some photos a bit lopsided with my cell phone, partly because I’m trying to walk the dog and take a picture at the same time. So then I straighten them out on the iPad. I may have become picky when I was taking photo classes years ago, and we used medium format and leveled the camera with a bubble like a carpenter uses. It seems extreme now, but I learned a lot from that experience.

On the plus side, the Photos app now has a place to click to open the picture in “Extensions,” and one of them is SKRWT, which I downloaded some time ago. I can modify receding lines in that and then go right back to Photos. I like the ease of Apple’s Photos app, especially since I no longer subscribe to Photoshop. I don’t like paying for subscriptions. They add up, and my income doesn’t go up because I’m retired. Or maybe that’s an excuse and I’m just cheap!