Carl Ferris Miller

Miller and his arboretum have received many awards including recognition by the United Kingdom's Royal Horticultural Society, the U.S. Freedom Foundation and the South Korean government. In 2002 he was awarded the Gold Tower Order of Industrial Service Merit by then-President Kim Dae-jung. In 2005, Miller posthumously became the fifth person awarded the Forest Hall of Fame Award for the contribution of the Chollipo Arboretum to South Korea's forestry sector. The International Dendrology Society picked the Chollipo Arboretum as the world's 12th site to be given an Arboretum Distinguished for Merit (the first to be so recognized in Asia) and the Holly Society of America named it the Official Holly Arboretum.

Miller eventually took the Korean name Min Byung-gal and in 1979 became a naturalized South Korean citizen.

During a 1962 swimming trip, a weekend getaway from Seoul, Miller was persuaded by a cash-poor, land-rich villager into buying a barren plot of land near the fishing village of Chollipo in Taean-gun. It sat idle until 1970, when, disgusted by Seoul's worsening air pollution, Mr. Miller moved his traditional Korean house from its Seoul location to his seaside retreat.

According to William C. Sherman, in 1949 Miller was his deputy at the Performance Review Section of the Economic Cooperation Administration in Seoul. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, he was evacuated to Japan, returning in 1951. In 1953 Miller worked for South Korea's central bank, the Bank of Korea, until his retirement in the early 1980s. He became fluent in the Korean language and later worked as a financial advisor and broker with a number of South Korean financial firms, ending with Good Morning Securities.

Miller, a native of Pittston, Pennsylvania, was a Phi Beta Kappa chemistry major in college. With the outbreak of World War II, he studied Japanese at the US Navy Japanese/Oriental Language School at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He went on to serve as a Naval Intelligence Officer. In 1945 he was assigned to seek out Japanese soldiers still on the island of Okinawa, questioning village residents during the day. At night, these soldiers would return to obtain food and other support from the villagers.

Carl Ferris Miller (1921–2002), also known by the Korean name Min Byung-gal (민병갈), was an American-born South Korean banker and arborist. Dr CF Miller is the best known as the founder of the Chollipo Arboretum Foundation in Taean-gun, South Chungcheong Province, South Korea, and one of the first Americans to be naturalized as a South Korean citizen.