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