R. O. Miller married his secretary, Carrie Southard in 1913 and thus began a long and fruitful wedded life for two talented and outgoing people.
Carrie Southard had been the secretary to Mr. Miller while he was the traffic manager for a local lumber company. Previously he was employed as Chief Clerk of the Omaha, NB office of the Illinois Central Railroad. Feeling there was no future in railroading for him, Mr. Miller entered the lumber business and in due time was transferred to Langdon, North Dakota in January of 1915.
After sixteen years in the lumber business the Millers purchased a bakery and confectionery business in Cooperstown, North Dakota where they established bread delivery routes to Aneta, Dazey, Hannaford, etc.
After four years in Cooperstown the Millers, searching for adequate housing for a growing family, moved to Valley City where the Miller Bakery was established. It was here that Mr. Miller invented the famous "MILLER ALL-WIDTH BREAD SLICER" a boon to thousands of housewives who found it difficult to slice bread evenly. A Canadian distributorship was set up but before national coverage was attained in the U.S. Mr. Miller passed away in 1946.
Carrie Miller carried on for the next ten years but the popularity of sliced bread doomed the slicer business. Mrs. Miller sold the equipment and ceased to produce the famous bread slicer.
In 1947 the Welcome Wagon, Inc. greeting service was set up in Valley City by Carrie Miller and she continued as the hostess for thirteen years - much too long she has remarked.
After retirement, Carrie Miller, always artistically inclined, enrolled at the Valley City State College to take courses in oil painting. Realizing that many of the old buildings in Valley City, famous in their time, were being razed, she undertook to reproduce these buildings in oil and some in India Ink. To date she has completed fifteen of these paintings some of which are to be found in the Feature Section of this book.
She is also interested in string and wire art and, although eighty-three years young, she keeps busy doing what she likes to do and visiting her remaining children, Walter, Edgar and Evelyn.
Source: Barnes County History 1976 Page 160