Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Jonah's Run 175th Anniversary

This year is 175th anniversary of Jonah’s Run Baptist Church, started by Collett’s. Including Collett, McKay, McCune, and Doster stories, I am writing stories about various other of our family members as they related to the church, including how Quaker Daniel Underwood, my mother’s father, never a Baptist, came to a Jonah’s Run Box Social where he bought Wilhelmina Hahn’s box. She was the new teacher at the Collett school south of Katy’s Lane, and she was staying with Collett "girls". Anyway, Dan and Wilhelmina soon married.

If Jane Desotelle sends me more info about her, I want to include some stories about Matilda Downing Underwood. Her first Underwood husband built her the Tower House to the east of Jonah’s Run. Her second Underwood husband owned the rest of the land adjacent to JR on the north side of SR 73. She was a recorded Quaker minister, a temperance and women suffrage leader.

I’ve just discovered that second generation Daniel Collett, one of the founders, bought 4+ acres, on both sides of the then Waynesville to Wilmington State Road, that apparently included the future site of Jonah’s Run church and cemetery, from Levi Lukens, the first Quaker to come here from Northern VA in 1802 or so, in 1839, just after the church was founded. In 1907, his two surviving daughters sold the 1+ acres on the north side of the road-where the church was built in 1839 and the cemetery was almost full before 1870 when the Collett’s quit burying there -of his 1839 purchase to the Jonah’s Run Baptist Trustees for $1.00.

My brother, John Doster, is working with others to clean up the cemetery again. After looking at grave markers and at the Howard Collett blueprint, I drew the following possible conclusions: I concluded why Revolutionary Daniel Collett, never a Quaker, was buried at Caesar Creek Quaker Meeting Cemetery (a mile east of where I’m writing this at, now, our Moses McKay House). The reason? He had six Quaker daughter-in-laws, including a granddaughter-in-law. Some were members at Caesar Creek. Daniel died in 1835. In 1839, some of those Quaker daughter-in-laws persuaded their Collett husbands to put two Quaker-style front doors on their new Jonah’s Run Baptist Church.

Where was Quaker Mary Haines Collett, Revolutionary Daniel’s wife, buried in 1826? Her sister-in-law, Sarah Collett Ashby, died in 1824. She was buried on the farm, and then her body was moved to Springfield Quaker Meeting cemetery, 1+ miles SE of the SE corner of the original Collett land. I’ve not found Mary’s name listed in any cemetery records in Clinton, Warren, or Greene Counties. I wonder if her body was buried a half mile west of Jonah’s Run, on Hatton’s Hill, 300 feet north of now SR 73, in the SW corner of Survey 770. Mom told me she used to pick wild flowers there while her father, Daniel Underwood, mowed that cemetery.

About 1821, neighbors, likely including Collett’s, built a public meeting house there, "so Betsy Gaddis could have a Presbyterian service". The Gaddis family had bought the SW corner of that survey 770 in 1816 from Abijah O’Neal, the first Quaker to come to SW Ohio in 1797 or so, from SC. (The land became my grandfather Underwood’s farm.) When the chimney fell down on some kids in 1835, the public meeting house was closed.

Howard

Friday, January 11, 2013

I. The Branson Connection

From page 329 and 326, Cecil O’Dell’s "Pioneers of Old Frederick County, Va.", plus my comments.

Thomas Branson, Sr. (b.1675 c.) bought and sold several tracts of land in Springfield and New Hanover Township, Burlington County, West New Jersey from 1725 to 1731. Thomas Branson, Jr. (b. 1700 c.) was in Virginia by 27 November, 1732, when he hired a surveyor to survey 1370 acres on both sides of Crooked Run. He received a patent from the Colony of Virginia for this tract on 3 October, 1734.

That same day, October 3, 1734, Robert McKay, Jr., my g-g-g-g-g grandfather, also received a patent from the Colony of Virginia for 828 acres, adjacent on the south to Branson. That same year, McKay built a two story walnut log cabin, where at least one Quaker Meeting was held in McKay’s house in 1734. During the Civil War, this house-with a new east end-was used as a hospital, by whichever side possessed it, and both did, several times. Until it burned in May, 2009, this was the oldest house in the Shenandoah Valley. Barbara and I visited it, and the nearby foundation, including fireplace, of my g-g-g grandfather, Moses McKay’s, house multiple times.

In 1731, McKay had come from Cecil County, Maryland, and before, from Monmouth County, East New Jersey, with his father and Jost Hite, who came from east of Philadelphia with 16 Dutch/German families, including Thomas Doster, Sr., my g-g-g-g-g-g grandfather. They were the first families into the Shenandoah Valley, arriving at about the same time as Alexander Ross and numerous Quakers who started Hopewell Meeting to the NE of the Hite/McKay group.

Recently, I’ve learned that Doster acquired some of Ross’s land. Also, from Hopewell Quaker, James Crumley’s will, we know that a Doster and Crumley had a granddaughter, Ruth Doster, perhaps a sister of my g-g-g grandfather, John Doster I, who was born in Culpepper, VA, in 1770, and is buried in Walnut Creek Quaker Cemetery, south of Washington CH, Ohio, as are his son and grandson. The next three generations, including my grandfather, dad, and brother, Richard, are buried in Corwin.

Thomas Branson and his wife, Rebecca, had moved to Orange County, NC, by 16 November, 1753. On 1 June, 1758, they deeded a 99-year lease for four acres "for use of Friends (Quaker) Meeting House and burying grounds." This was Crooked Run Meeting. It is on the west side of US 340/522, ¼ mile south of Nineveh, and maybe 10 miles south of Winchester, and 2-3 miles north of Cedarville, Va.

Howard

II. Crooked Run Meeting

Meshech Sexton - my Dad’s middle name was Sexton and this was his g-g grandfather-was "com", whatever that means, on 1785, 5, 6 at Crooked Run Quaker Meeting. Anyway, Moses McKay and Abigail Shinn, another of my g-g-g grandparents, were married at Crooked Run in 1793.

(This was two years after McKay’s and three other families received 3,000 pounds in settlement of the 50-year law suit with Lord Fairfax’s heirs over who owned the land in the Northern Neck of Virginia that Hite, McKay, Dillon, and Duff had received 20,000, and 40,000 acre grants from the Virginia Colony.)

Barbara and I have visited the Crooked Run cemetery, behind a now Presbyterian Church.

Why? Andrew McKay, my g-g-g-g grandfather, was buried there, about 1804. At that time, Quakers buried persons in a row, when they died. Because they thought it was too worldly to write on a tombstone, a McKay man showed us his likely headstone, a limestone field stone.

Howard

III. Moses McKay Arrives in Waynesville

In 1805, Moses McKay, Andrew’s son, brought Jane Ridgeway McKay, his 74-year old just widowed mother, to Waynesville. In October, the next year, she married Joseph Cloud, the first recorded minister in Miami Meeting. She died in December, 1806, and is likely buried just south of a more recent marked tombstone in the first row west of the Red Brick Meeting House.

In 1741, Bethany (Bethanah) Haines, (also from Burlington County W. Jersey, I assume, since his father, Richard, and grandmother Haines arrived there in 1682, coming on the ship, "Amity", where his grandfather, also Richard, died during the voyage . They were Quakers when they left England, but his father had been baptized in the Church of England in 1656.) bought 300 acres of Branson’s 1370-acre tract. Bethany’s youngest son, Robert, was born 3 September, 1736. When Robert’s will was proved on 3 February, 1796, he bequeathed the 300 acres his father had given him to his three youngest sons: Amos, Robert, and Nathan, all under 21 years old. He also willed other land to his son, John, and to his son, Noah.

John’s mother was Esther Wright. John owned a mill in Waynesville in March, 1804. He lost a water right law suit in the new Ohio Supreme Court, and moved 14 miles upstream on the Little Miami, where he bought a part of the land of the former Shawnee Village called Old Chillicothe, from Amos Haines, his half-brother.

Margaret Smith was the mother of Robert Haines other kids. They included Noah, who married Anna Silver; they were the parents of Seth Silver Haines, the founder of the bank and Waynesville’s first millionaire. Margaret’s daughter, Mary, married Jacob McKay, Moses’ brother. After Mary died, Jacob married Rachel Ridgeway, Moses’ sister-in-law. In 1816, or so, Moses bought land in Clinton County from Jesse McKay, son of Jacob and Rachel.

The first five Collett-McKay Picnics were held on this land, starting in 1866, on the site where Francis McKay (Moses and Abigail’s son) started Mt Pisgah Methodist Church just after his sisters families started Jonah’s Run Baptist Church in 1838, and where he is buried. The next picnics have been held a half mile SE on the south side of, now, Gurneyville Road, on the 1,000-acre land that Moses bought from the surveyor, Nathanial Massie, in 1805.

Amos Haines was the next son. I think he was an Indian agent. Robert was next.

Then, son, Nathan Haines, married Rachel McKay, oldest daughter of Moses McKay. They moved to the east side of Caesar Creek about 1815, about the same time Moses and Abigail McKay and family moved to the west side, a mile north of Harveysburg. Nathan/Rachel’s son( I forget his name), got that farm and one to the east which included the site of Haines School, ½ mile north of Underwood’s on Brimstone Road where Mom and Aunt Sara and their sisters started to school.

Howard

IV. Moses McKay

Moses and Abigail McKay likely lived on Caesar Creek while they built, now, our house in 1818, about two miles to their north.
I told you a Doster and a McKay came into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the same group in 1731. In 1893, Ed Doster, whose Dad, James Taylor Doster, had died when Ed was four, and who just moved around mostly with his mother’s relatives, was a hired hand, milking cows for his Quaker Aunt’s recorded minister husband-they were two of the first four 1875 Wilmington College grads and he(Amos Cook) was a member of Grove Meeting in Harveysburg as was another recorded minister, Matilda Downing Underwood, Mom’s step-grandmother, whose two Underwood husbands then owned all the land on three sides of Jonah’s Run Baptist Church.
Anyway, Cook’s neighbors to the east were Will and Lizzie Macy(Her grandfather was a Guilford, NC Quaker.) Collett, then members of Jonah’s Run. Will’s mother was Sarah McKay, and his sister, Ann, a JR charter member, was the oldest child of the four marriages in the 1820’s between the Collett’s and McKay’s. Ann’s daughter, Mary, was an unmarried Hickoryville one-room school teacher, who had attended Denison University on a Collett scholarship, and was Jonah’s Run organist.
Somehow, the Quaker Cook’s and Baptist Collett’s introduced their nephew/niece. They were married in 1893, and became tenants of the farm where Moses McKay first built a log cabin on the west side of Caesar Creek in 1815. This was just 162 years after a Doster and a McKay first came into the Shenandoah Valley together.
Dad and his three siblings, starting with Ann, were born there. I suppose Cook’s and Collett’s staked them their farming equipment and livestock. And, you must read Dad’s poem describing his first livestock production. It’s in Mom’s “Hello Cousins” book. Also, I must share my story of taking our daughter, Anne, to visit Ann Mason, my colored friend, in Harveysburg.
At a Collett-McKay picnic, Dad told me his red-haired McKay cousins used to come and visit. He said they always looked in the log cabin woodhouse at the McKay Stretcher. When I asked, he said it was a wood frame with four legs and two hinges plus two more legs for placing dead bodies at a funeral. He said there was one under JR church. I looked, but didn’t find it.
When Will died, Aunt Lizzie asked Doster’s to rent her farm, which they did, and moved in with her for two years, before starting a 40-year rental on, now Doster Road, where they moved when Dad was ten, a half mile from Dad’s grandmother, Ann Collett McCune. His father never owned any land. Somehow, Dad got Will/Lizzie’s bed, perhaps because Dad was also named William. Anyway, Barbara and I now sleep in that bed.
Howard

V. Early 1800's

I need to figure out exactly how the Haines were related to each other. Because they were related to both Collett’s and McKay’s, and were in Waynesville early, I think they likely caused both McKay’s and Collett’s to come to near here. (Doster’s came from VA to southern Fayette County-forty miles east of here-in 1810.)

As referenced in an Ashby genealogy I have, and will expand here later, there are two versions of where Collett’s originated-England or France, but in Virginia, Collett’s lived 25 miles NE of McKay’s, and also had Haines neighbors. My g-g-g grandmother, Mary Haines, whose father, Joshua and his brother, Abraham, bought 1120 acres with the surveyor, George Washington in 1750, just before she was born, was kicked out of Hopewell Quaker Meeting for marrying Daniel Collett, a recent Revolutionary private. She was re-instated and moved her membership to Miami Meeting in Waynesville in 1812, perhaps.

Though he was never a Quaker, Revolutionary Daniel Collett’s six Quaker daughter-in-laws, including a Rebecca Haines (Perhaps a niece of her mother-in-law), and three of my g-g-g grandfather Moses McKay’s daughters, buried Daniel’s body a mile NE of, now, our Moses McKay House, at Caesar Creek Quaker Meeting in 1835.

Howard

VI. The 1840's

Then, in 1839, they caused their husbands to put two Quaker-Style front doors in their new Jonah’s Run Baptist Church. It was built on land purchased that year by Revolutionary Daniel and Mary Haines Collett’s son, Daniel, from the first Quaker to come from northern Virginia in 1802, Levi Lukens; and adjacent on the SE of land formerly owned by the first Quaker to come to SW Ohio in 1797, South Carolina Quaker, Abijah O’Neall (Quaker Elihu Underwood’s, where Daniel and his siblings, Mom and her siblings, Robert, and I were born), and, on the NE, perhaps (I need to check this at the court house.) NY Quaker, Perseverd Dakin or his descendant, (Quaker Zephaniah Underwood’s, where PA Quaker Matilda’s klds were born).

While Collett bought an acre+ for the church and cemetery on January 22, 1839, his descendants didn’t sell it to the church trustees until March 4, 1907, long after the cemetery was full and the church had been remodeled. ???

Oh, I have a beaver hat that belonged to Zephaniah/Matilda’s daughter, Ruth Anna Underwood Tomlinson. You may remember that Matilda was a temperance leader and got the saloons closed in Clinton County. Mom, also a temperance leader, told me Matilda sent her daughter to an eastern Quaker boarding school to get her away from a Collett, because some of them drank alcohol. I wonder if this is the reason JR cemetery wasn’t expanded after it became full in the early seventies. Maybe Matilda just refused to sell anything to Colletts.

I need to add here how Colletts hired Wilhelmina Hahn, a German Lutheran from Blanchester, for their teacher, how Cotchum Collett, later the long-time national treasurer of Sigma Chi Fraternity, jumped out the school window and headed home only to be caught by Miss Hahn, how she came to a box social at JR with three Collett sisters. How Catherine, Aunt Kittie, Underwood who wanted to be a Baptist missionary, brought her brother, Daniel, to the box social, how Daniel bought Wilhelmina’s box, and they were soon married, etc. And, how Mom and Aunt Sara created their family welfare program as they paid Aunt Kittie to teach us all piano lessons, and she put all her money in the JR collection, and I learned to count by helping Dad count the money, some of which Mom traded for pennies to pay Aunt Kittie, also, our SS teacher.

Howard

VII. Jonah's Run Cemetery

About ten years ago, after Mom gave money for Jonah’s Run to get five acres of former Zephaniah/Matilda land, I tried, unsuccessfully, to expand the cemetery. Mom had picked out the spot, which I marked-fourteen 15-inch rows north of the seventh row of present tombstones. After church one Sunday, I put a white bucket on a steel fence post at the spot. She and I then went over to, now, Grismer’s, and sat on the front porch where many of you have seen us sit. It’s where she and Dad were married, in the house where she and her father were born.

She again looked to the SE where the Bullskin Trail ran, where the 1822 Public Meeting House was built with a cemetery on the SE corner of Underwood land where she used to pick wildflowers while Grandpapa cut the grass. Once, when I asked how her father cut it, she responded, "With a scythe, of course." She noted where the Hatton House was, saying Dr. Hatton called it "Pleasant View" Farm. She again said that was because they looked down on four Underwood girls. She noted the Martin House. She pointed out where Ruth Sullivan, Charles Ellison’s mother, lived and remembered they walked to Jonah’s Run and to Haines School together, saying Ruth was her oldest friend. (Charles and I started to school together.)

She said she and her sisters watched out the front porch door for two older Doster boys to drive down Collett Road in their horse-drawn school wagon to pick them up on their way to Kingman School. She remembered that Aunt Sara used to wrap yarn around my Uncle Charles’ ear as he drove the horses. She pointed out the site of the Collett Blacksmith Shop, and said Kathleen Graham rode her dad’s farm team over there to get the horses’ hooves shod. She remembered the McCoy House on the corner-now the Collett House at Pioneer Village. And, she told more stories about Underwood involvement at Jonah’s Run-which I’ll add later. Then, she looked SE to the apple storage she said her father built at Zephaniah’s place, and on to the Tower House, where she remembered taking her first bath in an inside bathtub-saying Matilda built the first house in the county with an inside tub, but not with an inside toilet, because that was not considered to be clean.

After I pointed out the white bucket on the post behind the church, Mom again said, "This is the one spot in the world where everything is in the right place". I agree. Perhaps we’ll figure out how to end a story on our Jonah’s Run website this way. Son, Dave, has reserved both .org and .com, and I plan to write articles this year for the local paper and the website regarding the 175th anniversary of JR. I will include some stuff that is in this doc .

Of course, I’m still thinking of how/when/where to increase the JR cemetery, including into the now Grismer Farm where I was born. Currently, I’m looking for an opportunity to interest Grismer’s to sell maybe two acres just west of the present cemetery, so as to extend now Collett Road north. Someday, SR 73 will be made four lane limited access, and I’d like to have that access be from an extended Collett Road.

Howard