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