Revolutionary Daniel Collett

Our ancestor, Revolutionary Daniel Collett, was a private-it says that on his tombstone in Caesar Creek Quaker Cemetery, a mile up New Burlington Road from where I’m sitting. He was not a Quaker; his wife, Mary Haines Collett, moved her Northern Virginia Hopewell Quaker Meeting membership to Caesar Creek Meeting, perhaps in 1812, after her daughter-in-law, who was also her Haines niece, had joined there.

This was also after Mary was re-instated, after getting kicked out of Hopewell Meeting in 1781-or 83, for MOU(marrying out of unity). In 1814, That Daniel and his son, Jonathan, purchased 2356-or 2358 acres, including 80 acres that I now own, which was the west half of VA Military Survey 1994. Because the surveyor, Nathanial Massie, messed up and left a "no-man’s" area there, it did not include the church site or even the site where the Collett cabin at now Pioneer Village was located, on the SE corner of now Collett Road.

That Daniel did not get 4,000 acres in recognition of his Revolutionary service. As a private, he was eligible for 100 acres, but I’ve not found where he received it. I’ve found no such record in Warren or Clinton or Greene County. In 1815, he did buy 971, or so, acres in northern Clinton County adjacent on the east of the first 1,000 acres that our other g-g-g grandfather, Moses McKay, bought from the surveyor, Nathanial Massie, in 1805.

I conclude Revolutionary Daniel and Moses, my two g-g-g grandfathers, must have known each other in Va. Although Daniel and Moses lived maybe 24 miles apart, Mary Haines and her cousins, were all members of Hopewell Quarterly Quaker Meeting, as were the McKay’s, and Haines families were neighbors to both Daniel and Moses, and had already married into both families in Virginia. As I will present in the story, I think Haines families likely caused both of my g-g-g grandparents to come to near here.

Of course, after four McKay’s married four Collett’s here in the 1820’s, their kids started the Collett-McKay Picnic in 1866, on McKay land. The 150th annual picnic is only two years away, so, starting this year, I’ll use some of this to promote that event.

When I first started writing the C-M Picnic story, I proposed it should be called the Haines-Collett-McKay Picnic. Then, after attending the 50th annual Zemri Haines Picnic at Caesar Creek One-Room School site in southern Greene County, I learned that I was related to that group only through the brothers who first came to Burlington, West Jersey, in 1682.

Soon, I learned from Bill Stubbs in Waynesville who had attended it, that my line had started a Haines Reunion at Caesar Creek Quaker Meeting, near our home, in 1850, 16 years before our first Collett-McKay Picnic. Although I’ve seen Haines family members still mowing the grass and maintaining the cemetery, now in the Park, that reunion was stopped when the Meetinghouse was moved to Pioneer Village.

(Now, back to Jonah Eaton who Roger mentioned in the church bulletin-Thanks to being a slave of the Shawnees who let him roam the area, after he was traded to the Virginians, Eaton, who was 15 when he was captured in Pa by Iroquois, served as a scout, probably for George Rogers Clark, and others; and he could and did draw pictures of the terrain for Major Anderson, the VA officer assigned to record the military land grants. Once, while reporting to Anderson in Louisville or Lexington, he got married, but only for a weekend, and he returned to his tree house-near the mouth of , now, Jonah’s Run, except it’s now under the Lake-alone. There’s more.)

Oh, I had not read about Jonah Eaton when I first heard the area near the JR church, including the place where I was born on Brimstone Road, was named "Eaton Township", from 1803 to 1810. I thought it was spelled EDEN, and I told some friends that was where I was born, before the apple. Based on the stories Mom told us while sitting on, now, Grismer’s front porch, Mom would have agreed with me. As you may remember, she said, "This is the one spot in the world where everything is in its right place."

What fun, I’m glad I rambled above. I wrote some stuff I hadn’t remembered earlier.

Howard

Doster Family Cemetery Sites: Underwood Part I

Underwoods came from England, and were early Quakers in America.  Multiple generations lived in Pennsylvania before Zephaniah and Priscilla Louis Underwood, my g-g-g grandparents, moved to Columbiana County, Ohio in 1809.  He died there, and she moved with her many kids to northern Clinton County, Ohio about 1826.  Her son and grandsons bought the farms north of Jonah’s Run Baptist Church, in 1856 and later.  They planted large acreages of apples and other fruit.  I was born on one of them.

One fall Saturday morning, I figured out why Underwood’s picked the land for their orchards.  John, my brother, had rented the farms after Paul Tomlinson, our cousin, had sold the Tower House place.  That morning, John was greasing his combine on the north slope on the north end of the farm.  I walked up to the top of the ridge and looked down on Jonah’s run Baptist Church, as well as the west farm where Grandpapa and Mom and I were born.  Although the soybeans were still damp and too tough to harvest on the north slope, the stalks and seeds were dry on the south slope.  That’s because of the great air drainage there, and that’s why my ancestors picked that place.  Someone claimed to have visited all the Underwood farms back to Pennsylvania.  They said they all had orchards.   I remember noting an early Underwood purchase here was just east of the Tower House, for a place to raise fruit trees.

Chester Quaker Meeting, Gurneyville Road, maybe two miles east of Collett-McKay Picnic site in NW Clinton County, Ohio.

Priscilla Louis Underwood, my g-g-g grandmother, who died in 1835.

Center Quaker Meeting, Center Road, maybe two miles south of Chester Meeting. 

Amos and Mary Shirk Underwood, my g-g grandparents.

Miami Cemetery in Corwin, near Waynesville, Warren County, Ohio.
            
Elihu and Hester Kirk Underwood, my g-grandparents.  A few minutes ago, I showed our grandsons, Nathanial and Eric Glaze, the location of the headstones for Elihu; for his first wife, Hester; and for his second wife, Matilda.  When she and I visited the cemetery on Memorial Day, Mom always remarked how her father, Daniel Underwood, decided how to place them.  Elihu is buried next to Hester, but his head is next to Matilda’s head.  Hester, from Clarksville, died in 1899.  Zephaniah, Elihu’s older brother, 1820-1900, died a year later.  Elihu then married his sister-in-law, Matilda Downing Underwood, 1851-?.  Jane Haines, Zephaniah and Matilda’s youngest child, was born in 1888, when her father was 68.  She died in 1986.  Note the time span for Jane and her father-1820 to 1986, 166 years.
 
Born in Pa, Matilda came to Ohio with her mother, sister and brother, to cook and keep house for Zephaniah, after he went back there to see his grandfather’s relatives.  Her mother was an Underwood cousin of Zephaniah’s.  Matilda wrote a book, “Bluebells of the Forest”.  Matilda soon got involved with the Temperance movement and helped close the saloons in Clinton County in the early 1870’s, and was selected a Recorded Minister at Grove Quaker Meeting (Hicksite) on the east edge of Harveysburg, as well as being involved with the woman suffrage movement.  Mom said Elihu, her grandfather, was pleased when she and her three younger sisters, all born after the Elihu/Matilda marriage, all called her “Grandmother”.  Matilda’s sister married a Romine and became the first woman physician in Ohio.  Her office was in the house on the east side of Maple Street at the south edge of Harveysburg.  She influenced Mary Cook (of Mary Cook Library in Waynesville), who graduated in the first HS class at Harveysburg in 1887, to become a physician.  Her brother became a noted local photographer.  I have also seen a copy of his patented invention for causing auto lights to blink.

Howard

Doster Family Cemetery Sites: Underwood Part II

I think Hester Kirk’s mother, or grandmother, was a Morrow.  Morrow’s came from Lake Champlain, NY, in 1814, to near Clarksville. Mrs. Morrow, a Quaker, told her sons to take enough men to run the Redcoats north into Canada and away from Lake Champlain.  Earlier, they had lived in the Delaware River Valley, and had been hounded by British soldiers during the Revolution.  Morrows brought China dishes, which I now have, in saddle bags from Lake Champlain.

When Elihu married Matilda, he moved into her Tower House.  She had designed it after Zephaniah offered to build it to help her recover from the death of a child.  Built in 1886, I think, it was the first house in the area with an indoor bath tub and rain water stored on the second floor from the eaves.  The toilet was outside.  Mom remembered going there to take a bath.  When Elihu moved to the Tower House, his son, Daniel, was living in the house where he was born with his three sisters;  Hattie who married a Furnas, Mary who married a Gilliam, and Kathryn who married a Heston.  Daniel soon met and married Wilhelmina Hahn.  When she moved in, Daniel’s sisters left.

Daniel and Wilhelmina Hahn Underwood, my grandparents.   Wilhelmina Hahn, from Blanchester, attended Lebanon Normal School before starting to teach at the one-room school on the south side of now SR 73, just south of Katy’s Lane, about 1900.  The first day, Robert ”Cotchum” Collett, jumped out the window and over the fence and headed for home.  Grand Mama saw him leave and jumped out and over and brought him back.  When the boys kicked as high as they could and made a mark on the school wall, Grand Mama out kicked them.

Cotchum, who built the nice house on the south side of SR 73 maybe 1/2 mile east of Jonah’s Run Church, was the long-time national secretary of Sigma Chi, our son Daniel’s fraternity.  He is also likely the “Collett” who was making eyes at Ruth Anna Underwood, Matilda and Zephaniah’s daughter.  Though she wouldn’t say anything to embarrass anyone, Mom told me Matilda sent Ruth Anna to an eastern Quaker Boarding School, so as to get him away from “those Colletts, some of whom drank alcohol.”  Last year, Ruth Anna’s granddaughter gave me Ruth Anna’s beaver bonnet.
Although Quaker Grand Papa never attended Jonah’s Run, Aunt Kitty, Grand Papa’s sister, walked to Jonah’s Run Baptist Church, and she studied for missionary work at Chicago Northern Baptist Seminary, but never got an assignment.   She was a longtime JR member, and my Sunday School and piano teacher.  I wonder how many times she put the same pennies in the JR church collection that I helped Dad, the longtime JR treasurer, count on the desk I now have, and Mom used to pay her for piano lessons.  I now realize my parents, plus my Braddock and Furnas cousins’ parents supported Aunt Kitty by having their kids take piano lessons from her.  I still remember her saying she put her last pennies in the SS collection.

 (Dad replaced his father as Jonah’s Run Treasurer.  I replaced Dad.  Jonathan Collett, my g-g grandfather, was the first treasurer in 1838.)

Grand Papa did go with Aunt Kitty to a church Box Social where he bought the new school teacher, Miss Hahn’s lunch basket.    Grand Mama stayed with three Collett sisters on Denny road, just SE of the school.  She was upstairs sewing her corset when Daniel Underwood came calling.  A Collett sister came upstairs and told Grand Mama that Mr. Underwood was there.  “He must be here to see you,” Grand Mama responded.    “No, he’s never come to see any of us.  He’s here to see you,” the Collett woman said.  They were soon married.  I have a picture of them on their honeymoon at Niagara Falls.  Mom said Grand Papa could touch his fingers when he put his hands around Grand Mama’s waist.   
               
William and Esther Underwood Doster, my parents.

Howard

Romohr: Crosson Cemetery in SE Warren County

My g-g grandparents who came to America on a sailing ship in the 1850’s from Germany.  They built the large barn at Blackhawk crossroads, south of Clarksville.  Mom and I found their still inhabited walnut log cabin-inside a stucco house on west side of road, ¼ mile south of Blackhawk intersection.  Sara Romohr Hahn, my g-grandmother, was born in this log cabin.  She didn’t get to attend much school, but she could do math with her kids.  She married Mark Hahn.  They lived just south of Blanchester on the west side of the road south of the location of the former Blanchester Fairgrounds, where I later played softball.  Mark farmed, taught school, and was a founding Director of the Blanchester Bank.  He died at a young age, and Ma’s only income was from the bank stock, which my mother eventually inherited.  Ma kept house for Ada, our Auntie, her school teacher daughter, until Auntie became a mail order bride living in Texas; then moved to North Spring Street in Wilmington where she kept a cow and chickens and garden.  She died at age 82, I think, after getting hot from chopping up a cherry tree.  She chided Mom for taking too many naps, but Mom lived to 105.

When Mom and I drove by their south of Blanchester house, she always pointed out the two large trees in the front yard; one for her sister, Sara, and one for her.  Oh, starting with Ma’s name, there has been a Sara or Wilhelmina in each succeeding generation as follows:  Sara Romohr Hahn, Wilhelmina Hahn Underwood (my grandmother), Sara Underwood Braddock, Wilhelmina Braddock Branson, Sara Branson Homstad.

Two of Ma’s brothers are buried west of Blanchester.  Even after she couldn’t walk over to the graves, I drove Mom near the site, and she shared, “After the first joined the Union Army, the second tied his team of horses to a tree and followed his brother.  They were prisoners together in Atlanta.  One asked the other, ‘Is that the same moon we used to see at home?’”

Howard

Hahn: Blanchester Cemetery

Mark and Sarah Romohr Hahn, my g-grandparents, are buried in this cemetery, as are Clifford and Roberta Hahn, their son and daughter-in-law, in a different lot.  Mark’s headstone has been moved slightly.  Uncle Clifford liked to play baseball.  He was a red-hat conductor on trains out of Cincinnati.

Charles and Wilhelmina Kipp Hahn came from Germany in 1826, I think, to perhaps near Georgetown, but Mom and I never found their farm.

(Somehow, I remember that either Romohr or Hahn met an Irish woman on the way from Germany and married her.)

Doster, Thomas Doster, immigrant, likely came to America in 1715, a year when no ship records were kept in Baltimore.  He lived in West Jersey and perhaps eastern Pa, before joining Jost Hite’s group of 16 German families to go south and, with his wife, and baby son, Thomas II,   become the first families to move into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1731, just a few months earlier than other Quakers moved just east of them and started Hopewell Quaker Meeting.  There is no record of Thomas buying land, but in his 1845 will, probated in now Winchester, Va, he gave 200 acres each to three sons.  Likely, Thomas did not negotiate his land with Lord Fairfax when Fairfax came to near Winchester in 1735.  When I hired a professional genealogist, she concluded Thomas’ land was now likely the city dump in NE Winchester. Although the Hopewell Quaker records were burned with the meetinghouse in 1756, Thomas II likely married Quaker Jane Crumley, and, in 1770, they became the parents of John Doster I, who came to Ohio in 1810.

Three generations of Dosters; John I, John II, and James Taylor, my g-grandfather, are buried in Walnut Creek Quaker Cemetery in southern Fayette County, Ohio, across road from now Greenfield Country Club.  John I and John II came here from northern Virginia in 1810.

James Taylor Doster died when his son, Edward Barclay Doster, born in 1862, was only four.  Edward then lived around with his mother’s relatives.  On Labor Day, in September, 1984, I took Dad to view Doster sites in the Greenfield-New Martinsburg area.  We found one or two Doster graves in Walnut Creek that are not mentioned in the Doster Genealogy.??  We also found Jane Eyre’s grave (James Taylor’s wife and my g-grandmother) in Greenfield cemetery with her daughter, Alice, and her husband.  Jane’s mother was a Quaker named Reese. I want to check on that name in Highland County.  I think Rees came from northern Virginia, also.  Dad said his father told him that he lived some with his Eyre uncle, perhaps a county commissioner, in northern Highland County.  Ed told Dad that, as a boy, he sometimes caught minnows in the morning in a small stream on one side of the farm; then, in the evening, he fished in a stream on the other side of the farm.
Dad said his father took him fishing only two times, even though Dad was born and lived for ten years along Caesar Creek, now under Lake Caesar.  Dad took me fishing only two times; once when the family vacationed on an Island in Lake Superior, and before that, in a pond near Kingman.  That day, a storm came up and lightning struck a tree which hit our fishing poles hanging out of our car as we drove home.

I now have James Taylor’s double barrel gun, likely made about 1850.  I also have a wooden sugar box.  These are about the only Doster things any of us have.  Ed never owned any land. 
About 1890, Ed Doster came to just west of Harveysburg, to milk cows for Amos Cook, his cousin’s husband.  Cook and his Doster wife were in the first (1875) Wilmington College graduating class of four persons.  Amos was also a recorded minister at Quaker Grove Meeting in Harveysburg.
Cooks neighbors to the east were William and Lizzie Macy Collett.  William was a younger brother of Ann Collett, my g-grandmother.  Their parents were Jonathan and Sarah McKay Collett, my g-g grandparents.  These Colletts had an unmarried Hickoryville school teacher niece named Mary McCune.  Somehow, this Doster met this McCune.  They married.  Somehow they got a cow and horse or two and rented the Romine Farm, maybe a half mile upstream from Colletts on Caesar Creek, where they had all four of their kids, including Dad who was born in 1899.

Once, at a Collett-McKay Picnic, Dad said his red-haired McKay cousins used to visit them at the Romine Farm.  He said they always looked in the log cabin woodhouse at the Mckay stretcher.  “What’s a McKay Stretcher?” I asked.  “It’s a table with four legs, plus hinges and two more legs, where they placed dead persons,” Dad said.  He went on, “There’s one under JR church.” Later, I looked under the church, but found nothing.

(On a late November Sunday AM, son Dan, maybe age 12, and I took slide pictures of many of my family’s houses, including the Romine House, where Dad was born and the Will Collett House, where Ed and Mary Doster moved their young family in 1909, when Will Collett died, and Lizzie, his widow, rented it to Dosters, before Dosters moved in 1910 to the Mrs. Harris farm they rented for 40 years on now Doster Road, where I grew up.  Oh, Barbara and I now sleep in the Will and Lizzie Collett bed, which Dad and Mom used.  I don’t know why Dad got the bed.  Maybe it was because Dad’s name was also William.)

William and Esther Underwood Doster, my parents, were married on June 18, 1930, on the front porch of the Brimstone Road Underwood brick house, where Mom and her father, Daniel, were born.

Howard

McKay

Likely Scotch Irish, Robert McCoy (McKay) and his son, Robert, somehow came into the Shenandoah Valley of northern Va in 1731, with Jost Hite and Thomas Doster.  McKay and Hite soon went down to Williamsburg and got another land grant for 40,000 acres, and then another.  When a Lord Fairfax appeared from England to claim “all the land in America that wasn’t already claimed, McKay and Hite soon got in legal fights with Fairfax which lasted until after all were dead and after the Revolution.  Fairfax may have had the better claim-it was given to him by King Charles, I think, after a Fairfax ancestor loaned him money when Charles was trying to retain his title- but Fairfax heirs lost the lawsuit.  I have a multipage copy of the records which span many years which I found in a library at the University of Kentucky.  Unfortunately, the last page is so messed up, I can’t tell how it ended.

In about 1725, a McCoy daughter married a Quaker in eastern Pa.  This is the first known reference to McKays.  Soon after arriving in VA, Robert, Jr. married a Quaker, at Nottingham Meeting in SE Pa, perhaps.  Robert Jr’s 1734 home at Cedarville,Va., was used as an early Quaker Meeting site.  Barbara and I first found this recently destroyed house, then the oldest house in the Shenandoah Valley, 18 years ago.  Later, at a McKay reunion there, we learned it survived many, many Civil War battles because it was used as a hospital, no matter which side occupied it.  One of Moses McKay’s sons stayed in Virginia.  Thus, McKay cousins served on both sides in the Civil War.

On one of our Virginia trips, Barbara took a picture of me standing in the fireplace of Moses Mckay’s home-which burned about 1950, which was just 200 feet south of his ancestor, Robert’s home.  Between the two houses is/was the largest spring in the area. (Remember, our Moses McKay House is built on the site of many springs.) The city of Front Royal, maybe seven miles to the south recently bought the former McKay house sites so as to pump the spring water to Front Royal.
I want to do more checking, but I am aware that a Haines family lived adjacent to McKays at Cedarville, and another Haines family lived next to Daniel and Mary Haines Collett, some 24 miles NE of Cedarville, SE of now Charlestown, W, Va, and perhaps 4 miles from Hopewell Quaker Meeting.  Dosters lived maybe in between Colletts and McKays.

There are perhaps three McKay generations between Robert, Jr and Moses.

After first bringing his just widowed mother, Jane Ridgeway Mckay, from Cedarville-between Winchester and Front Royal, Va, to Waynesville in 1805 when he also bought 1,000 acres, including the now four acre Collett-Mckay Picnic site, from Nathanial Massie, the surveyor, Moses McKay, my g-g-g grandfather, brought his family to one mile north of now Harveysburg on the west side of Caesar Creek in 1815.  Although I think Sarah McKay Collett, my g-g grandmother, inherited this farm, it was soon owned by a Mr. Romine, whose family rented it to my grandfather Doster.??  This house, on the northwest side of Caesar Creek, was perhaps 1 ½ miles south of our present Moses Mckay House, on the south side of the Little Miami River.

I have seen a contract between Moses McKay, my g-g-g grandfather and Arvinia Gaston, a free woman of color, which I included in a story in the 200th anniversary issue of Waynesville.  The colored persons helped build our present home in 1818, and the next McKay generation served as an Underground Railroad Station Master, as did four of my Doster relatives near New Martinsburg and Walnut Creek in southern Fayette County.

In the 1820’s, four McKay kids from our house married four Colletts, including two of Moses Collett’s kids from just up the road near Roxanna, and two of his siblings, from Dan Collett’s farm, south of now Jonah’s Run.  Sarah McKay married Jonathan Collett in 1823, and moved to the now Hole in the Woods House where McKay Collett now lives, where Ann Collett, my g grandmother was born in 1824. I have a pink luster plate, one of four brought to this Collett-McKay wedding in saddle bags.

Moses McKay was kicked out of Quaker Meeting in Virginia at age 13 for marching on the Front Royal town square with a broom stick during the Revolution.  He was kicked out again, for non-attendance of Meeting, or by another account, for having stills.  Abigail Shinn McKay, my g-g-g grandmother, and their kids moved their Quaker membership to Caesar Creek Quaker Meeting, just a mile east of now, our house.  However, she got kicked out for joining a sect.  When she and Moses both died in 1828, they were buried just north across the Little Miami River in Mount Holly Methodist Cemetery.  Their kids started Mt Pisgah Methodist Church on Gurneyville Road, on Moses’ land, where some Mckays were buried and where the first few Collett-McKay picnics were held before the picnic was moved maybe 200 yards across the road to the SE.

Howard