Esther Underwood Doster, my mother, often observed that Jonah's Run is a Baptist Church with a Quaker conscience. Colletts started Jonah's Run in 1838, and several Collett men married Quaker women. They included Daniel Collett; his sons Moses, Jonathan, and Daniel; and his grandson, Daniel. Three of those marriages were to Quaker McKay women who were living in this house when they were married.

More recently, William Doster, a Collett descendent and Jonah's Run member, married Mom, then a Quaker, and became my father. There's was the only marriage between the two families who lived so long surrounding Jonah's Run, on both sides of now SR 73.

Also, Wallace Collett married Carrie Miller, a Wilmington College Quaker classmate. At his Jonah's Run Memorial Service last year, Wallace was remembered for serving as chairman of the Quaker Wilmington College Trustees, and as chairman of the American Friends Service Committee. In that role, he visited China in the early 70's, the year before another Quaker with local roots, President Richard Nixon, visited. Some of Nixon's ancestors are buried at nearby Caesar Creek Quaker Meeting cemetery, where Daniel Collett, never a Quaker who died three years before Jonah's Run was started, is also buried.

Currently, three members of Jonah's Run, Nellie Rich, my brother, John, and I, had Quaker mothers.

Caesar Creek is one of eleven Quaker Meeting sites and cemeteries within eight miles of Jonah's Run. Although I didn't realize it until long after I was born on my Quaker grandfather's farm adjacent on the west to Jonah's Run, I'm now aware Jonah's Run sits in the center of one of the largest concentrations anywhere of early nineteenth century Quakers. Either or both my parents have relatives buried in seven of those cemeteries.

Why did they come here? That's a question I continue to ask, as I also continue to reflect on their influence here, especially in colored people Underground Railroad and other relations and education, as well as in women suffrage, and prohibition.

I still have Dad's Loyal Temperance Legion membership card, and I read where William Lukens family still had his LTL membership card. When I was in the fifth grade at Harveysburg, Mom and Helen Wall, both wives of school board members and both later members of Jonah's Run used to come to school once a month to teach a temperance lesson. Lukens's son, Don, was the first president of the Loyal Temperance Legion club they started.

I will always remember one time I recited the LTL pledge. It was in early September, 1991, a few days after the coups in Russia. I was in St Petersburg, Russia, the day the name was changed back from Leningrad, with seven of my Purdue University colleagues. We were reviewing their agricultural research stations. In the office of the director at the first station, a huge picture of Lenin was still on the wall, and, on bulletin boards outside, people were debating what to do with Lenin's long-dead body, then still on display in Moscow.

The director had set his reception table with dishes of fat slices, fat-fat slices, and tomato slices, plus vodka and Pepsi glasses. I had earlier decided I wasn't going to get drunk in Russia. The first time the director noticed I wasn't drinking, I didn't say anything. The second time the director noticed, my Purdue Party leader poked me to drink some vodka, but I didn't. The third time the director spoke, I responded. I said, "I'm now thinking of my ninety-year old mother who once taught me the Loyal Temperance Legion motto, "Not too much of anything, and some things none at all." It got very quiet, but no one ever challenged me at any of the other 14 research stations we toured, and ate the same fat slices, etc.

But that wasn't the only alcohol experience of our Purdue group. The last two stations were near Kiev, and we split up. One Purdue professor went alone to a forestry station where he got so drunk he threw up all the way, and had to miss a big reception at a hunting lodge/party house run by the leader of Ukraine. At the reception, although our table had vodka and Pepsi, the leader didn't drink. He said he was going to The Hague the next day to try to get some money to pay state employees in Ukraine, since he had failed to get any money in Moscow.

Late in the evening, I was sitting at our table with our young interpreter. Earlier, she had taught all of us how to dance, and by now, my colleagues were dancing with themselves or each other or with some of the mostly Mongol-looking other persons present. I asked her how she could possibly seem to be sober when I had seen her drinking so much vodka with my colleagues.

"You weren't watching me closely enough," she said, and then concluded, "I quickly drank most of my Pepsi. Then, each time, after pouring everyone vodka, I secretly poured mine from my vodka glass into my Pepsi glass." "Where did you learn to do that?" I asked. "At interpreter's school," she answered.

Last Sunday, my wife, Barbara, and I attended the 200th anniversary of the construction of the Waynesville Quaker Miami Quarterly Meeting House. This is the oldest continuously meeting house of worship west of the Alleganies. Inside is a quotation written by my Uncle, Raymond Braddock. He says, "Nowhere in the world has any other group of people moved so far because of the suffering of another group of people."

Uncle Raymond was referring to the 2,000 Quakers who moved to the Waynesville area before 1810, mostly from North and South Carolina and Virginia, causing the need to build the large Meeting House. They sold their homes and farms, often for a fraction of their value, to come to the new slave-free Northwest Territory, north and west of the Ohio River. Almost as a bonus, they also got better farmland, and realized a right to trial by jury and a provision for funding schools. For these reasons, Esther Doster, my Miami Meeting Quaker mother and a long-time history teacher who was also still teaching a Jonah's Run Sunday School class on her ninety-second birthday, said the Ordinance of 1787 was more significant than our earlier Declaration of Independence.

At the end of the Revolution, Virginia claimed ownership of this country. In 1784, as a condition for joining the other colonies to form the United States, Virginia retained the right to "pay" her Revolutionary soldiers in land, some of which was east of the Little Miami River. Although Virginian Nathaniel Massie and others started surveying this land in 1787, Shawnee and other Indians controlled it until after Mad Anthony Wayne got most of the tribes, other than Tecumseh, to sign the Treaty of Greenville in 1795.

Samuel Highway laid out Waynesville in the spring of 1797. In the fall of that year, Abijah O'Neal, a North Carolina Quaker, came to Waynesville looking for a place to move with his young family. He found and liked 3110 acres on the east side of the Little Miami, just south of now Corwin, down to just north of where Caesar Creek flows into the Little Miami. It had been surveyed for a Virginia Revolutionary Colonel, a surgeon.

When O'Neal asked his Bush River Quaker Meeting for permission to move to Waynesville, the meeting turned him down. Why? There were no Quakers in Waynesville! O'Neal, his brother-in-law and another family came, anyway. They started holding Meetings in their homes. By 1801, twelve families requested the establishment of a Preparative Meeting under the care of Westland Monthly Meeting in Pennsylvania, and two years later, Miami Monthly Meeting was established. By five years later, no one was left at the former large Bush River Quaker Meeting in North Carolina! Also, local Meetings had been started nearby at Caesar Creek, Center, Springfield, and elsewhere.

O'Neal's journey to Ohio was typical of many Quakers. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1754, soon moved with his parents and many others to northern Virginia. Some, including the O'Neal family-but not Dosters, McKays, or Haines- moved south to Carolina, as the French and Indians threatened. Near the end of the Revolution, O'Neal, a consiencous objector even then, was questioned by the British as to where the locals were hiding. When O'Neal refused to answer, they used his head to sharpen their swords. He was left for dead in a ditch. A neighbor girl nurtured him back to good health and they soon married. About the time they decided to come to Ohio, Quaker Zackeriah Dicks predicted blood would be spilled over slavery within the lifetime of some Quakers hearing him.

Levi Lukens was perhaps the first Virginia Quaker to come to near Waynesville, along with his father-in-law, Ezekial Cleaver, and their families, in 1802. He bought land near now Henpeck and moved into his own new log cabin at now Caesar Creek Pioneer Village, early in 1808. In 1812, he purchased the entire 1,000-acre survey 575, which includes all of now Harveysburg and runs in a narrow strip along the south side of survey 770. Although it was no-man's land for a long time, Jonah's Run was built near the east end of Lukens land, north of the NW corner of survey 1994, half of which was purchased in 1814 by Daniel Collett and his son, Jonathan, my g-g grandfather. The south edge of Lukens land is just behind Charles Ellison's house, and the north edge of his survey is just beyond the north side of Jonah's Run Church.

Levi was on the board that purchased the land for Quaker Grove Meeting and school in 1818 at the south end of Lukens Road a half mile east of Hen peck. Lukens also built the fine brick home on his survey down the avenue west of Harveysburg where Nellie Rich's Quaker mother lived, and that Roger and Alma Plummer tried in vain to save from Lake Caesar. In about 1816, he built a frame house NE of Harveysburg where I remember Ed Lukens living. In 1837, he sold Grove Meeting the lot where they built a Hicksite Meeting House on Main Street at the east end of Harveysburg. About 1840, Levi built the house where William Lukens lived. Mary Caroline, William's oldest daughter, now owns a small parcel north of the Ed Lukens house. It's the last Lukens owned property in his original survey.

In 1827, one of Levi Lukens daughters married a Hatten. That's how Hattens came to own most of the land east of Harveysburg to the county line. Thus, Mirium Hatten Lukens was a Lukens before she became William Lukens third wife. She and her sister gave the current park to the county. Just before she died, Mirium included a note in her Christmas card to me. She said Lukens and Dosters had always lived together, all the way back to Germany. I now wish I had learned more information from her.

Before receiving that note, I just knew I was supposed to marry Lois Lukens, William and Edith's youngest daughter. I knew William Lukens and my dad had played together in Caesar Creek when their dads farmed on either side of the creek. And, William Lukens had gotten dad to join the Waynesville American Legion, just before I was selected to attend Buckeye Boys State. And, though they were Quakers, the Lukens kids regularly attended Jonah's Run activities, including at least one church camp on Lake Erie. And, I knew Mom and Edith were soriety sisters at Wilmington College. Lois' husband and kids showed no expression when I told them about Lois and me at Mirium's memorial service. I didn't tell them that dad and I named one of my Jersey calves "Lois".

In Quaker records, I've found eight generations of my Dad's ancestors in eastern Pennsylvania in the late 17th century, and also eight generations in northern Virginia in the late eighteenth century. I'm satisfied as to why some of them came to SW Ohio to get better land in slave-free territory, with a trial by jury, and provision for schools. I'm still trying to learn why any of them came here.

I do know that Quaker Mary Haines Collett asked her oldest son, Joshua, to not stay in Kentucky after he visited his Collett cousins in Kentucky, formerly a slave-holding county of Virginia. Joshua did move to Cincinnati where he studied law, before moving up to be one of the first four persons in Lebanon in 1801, where he was an attorney, and soon served on the State Supreme Court.

I also know that a John Haines owned a mill in Waynesville in March of 1804, before moving 14 miles to north of Xenia, still on the Little Miami, where, in 1807, he bought half of the survey of the former Old Chillicothe Shawnee Village where Tecumseh was born. And, I know that Priscilla Haines Collett, Mary Haines Collett's niece, and also daughter-in-law, came to Waynesville in 1805 with Daniel/Mary Haines Collett's second son, Moses. Finally, I've learned that a Virginia Haines family lived next to Moses McKay near Cedarville, Va, and another Haines family lived next to Daniel Collett some 25 miles to the NE.

I suspect someone in the Haines family caused my Collett-McKay ancestors to move to near Waynesville, but I'm still looking for the clinching evidence. Oh, I've also found that one of Moses McKay's daughters married a Haines in Virginia, and they lived on the east side of Caesar Creek, north of now Harveysburg, in 1815, when Moses lived on the west side.

The Gaddis Family, New Jersey Presbyterians, bought the now Grismer Farm in 1816 from Abijah O'Neal, the first SW Ohio Quaker. About 1820, Betsy Gaddis persuaded neighbors, including several Quakers, and likely some Colletts, to build a log public meeting house where Presbyterians could meet, near the SW corner of their farm, perhaps in Levi Lukens survey 575, also at the SW corner of Survey 770, just SE of now Reniance Village, a half mile west of Jonah's Run. The spot was at the junction of the north-south Bullskin Trail and the east-west trail that eventually became SR 73. My mother remembered picking flowers in the cemetery there while Daniel, my Underwood grandfather, cut the cemetery grass. When I asked how he cut it, she answered, "With a scythe, of course."

Gaddis built the now Grismer brick home about 1835, probably at the same time a brother built a similar brick home a mile north on Brimstone Road. One of the Gaddis girls was a charter member of 1838 Jonah's Run, just before she and her sister married two Ashby men, also charter members and nephews of Daniel and Mary Haines Collett. Two Gaddis persons were among the first to be buried at JR.

Other JR charter members included my g-g-grandfather, Jonathan Collett, his brother Daniel, and his daughter, Ann, my g-grandmother, who was born in 1824 in the east room of McKay and Dianne Collett's Hole-in-the-Woods farm home. Jonathan's wife, Sarah, soon joined, and both are buried at JR. Sarah was living here in this house when they married in 1823, the first of four marriages in the 1820's between children of Moses and Abigail Shinn McKay, northern Virginia Quakers, and children or grandchildren of Daniel and Mary Haines Collett, also northern Virginians.

McKays were perhaps the first Quakers to move into northern Virginia in 1731, and they held Meeting at their new log home in 1734. Until it burned two years ago, it was the oldest home in the Shenandoah Valley. Because it was used as a hospital in the first and many other Civil War battles, it survived when most structures were destroyed. (Most McKays had been kicked out of Meeting by then, and McKay cousins fought on both sides of the war. Two that were killed are buried at Jonah's Run.)

The first McKay, then called McCoy, came from SE Pennsylvania into the Shenandoah Valley of northern Virginia with 16 German families, including Thomas Doster I, my six-great grandfather. His son married Jane Crumley, from a prominent Quaker family who moved with many others from SE Pennsylvania to just east of the Shenandoah and east of now Winchester, Va, in late 1731. 160 years later, at Harveysburg, a McKay/Collett married a Doster.

Here's how that came about. Some of you will remember Charlie Cook, who had a dairy farm just west of Harveysburg on the north side of SR 73. Did you know his middle name was Doster? His father was Amos Cook, who later became a recorded minister at Grove Quaker Meeting in Harveysburg. His mother was Almira Doster, who was a member of Walnut Creek Quaker Meeting in southern Fayette County where Dosters had migrated from northern Virginia in 1810. Amos and Almira were two of the four members of the first graduating class at Wilmington College in 1875.

Somehow, Amos hired Ed Doster, Almira's nephew, who had just lived around with relatives after his father died when he was four. William and Lizzie Macy Collett farmed the land just east of Cooks. William had an unmarried niece, Mary McCune, who was the daughter of his sister, Ann, the JR charter member. She was teaching school at Hickoryville.

Somehow, they met and married. They were my Doster grandparents. They rented the Caesar Creek bottoms farm a mile north of Harveysburg where Moses McKay had brought his family in 1815 while they built our 1818 house.

Moses had brought his just widowed mother and sister to Waynesville in 1805. His mother soon married Joseph Cloud, the first recorded minister at Waynesville Meeting. She died in 1806 and is buried just west of the Waynesville Red Brick Meeting House. In 1805, Moses also bought his first 1,000 acres in Ohio, just east of New Burlington, from the surveyor, Nathaniel Massie. Four acres of this land is now the site of the annual Collett-McKay Picnic, held the second Saturday each August since 1866. It was started by relatives, partly to learn who returned from the war. Soon after joining nearby Caesar Creek Quaker Meeting, McKays were kicked out. The parents are both buried just north of our house across the Little Miami River in Mt Holly Methodist cemetery. Their kids helped start Mt Pisgah Methodist Church on former Moses McKay land on Gurneyville Road, as well as Jonah's Run Baptist Church, adjacent on the north to Daniel Collett land.

Dad and his siblings were born on that former McKay farm. He never mentioned knowing about our house, but he did tell me his red-haired McKay cousins used to come and visit. He said they always went into the log cabin wood house and looked at the "McKay Stretcher". When I asked what that was, he said it was a wooden platform with four legs and a hinged addition where dead people were placed. He said there was one under JR, but I've never found it.

When Dad was eight, his great Uncle Will died, and Dad's parents rented that Collett farm from his Aunt Lizzie for two years, before moving to the rented farm on now Doster Road where Dad lived for the next forty years, except for the four years we lived in the Underwood tenant house on the now Grismer farm, where my brother, Robert, and I were born. Somehow, Dad acquired his Uncle Will's Jenny Lynn bed, which Barbara and I now sleep in.

Although there is a French version, the last time I saw Wallace Collett, he confirmed to me that he had visited Little Giddings, England and concluded our Collett ancestors came from there. They were well educated. An ancestor was Lord Mayor of London in 1496. His oldest son, John Colet, was King Henry VIII's priest, and he preached at Cardinal Wolsey's ordination. He got Rasmussin to come from Holland to England to translate the bible to English in 1508, and he often preached in English, a first for the times. Fortunately for him, he died just before King Henry started beheading persons.

Colletts came into NE Virginia from Maryland after the first generation came from England in 1650. Daniel Collett was a private in the Revolution. While on our first genealogy trip to Northern Virginia twenty years ago, my wife, Barbara and I found Quaker records showing Mary Hains was kicked out of Hopewell Quaker Meeting in 1783 for marrying Daniel Kalot out of unity (MOU). Dan learned to read as an adult, and became a Justice of the Peace, maybe even the Sheriff-we found such evidence for 1813-14 in the Charlestown, now WV, library.

The librarian also gave us a copy of an 1811 survey of 1180 acres, located on Bullskin Creek just SW of now Charlestown and NE of Hopewell Meeting, that belonged to a Hannah Washington at her death that year. Why is that significant? The neighbor on the SW was a Haines, and the next neighbor north was Daniel Collett. Oh, the year before Mary Haines was born in 1753, her father and uncle bought 1180 acres on Bullskin Creek with a surveyor named G. Washington.

Born in 1732, George Washington first visited NE Virginia in 1748, just before he started surveying land there and to the west for Lord Fairfax. He liked the area around now Charlestown, later started by his brother, Charles in 1756.

Mary Haines parents and uncle came to near Hopewell Quaker Meeting in northern Virginia with many other Quakers from eastern Pennsylvania, and Burlington, New Jersey. Her Haines ancestor, Richard, had been a member of the Church of England when his son, Richard, my ancestor, was baptized in 1656. But, the family members were Quakers when they came on the ship Amity to Burlington in 1682. A son, John, was already living in a cave on the Delaware River, having come in 1679, when William Penn owned West Jersey, but had not yet acquired Pennsylvania.

My mother's Underwood family lived on the north-eastern headwaters of Jonah's Run stream, on the land to the west and north of Jonah's Run Baptist Church for over 100 years. They trace their Quaker identity back to Alexander Underwood, a Quaker minister in New Jersey, then Pennsylvania, in the late 1680's. They moved from Pennsylvania to Columbiana County, Ohio in 1809 before removing to NE Clinton County in 1825. My g-g-g grandmother, Priscilla Lewis Underwood, is buried at Chester Quaker Meeting cemetery, and my g-g-grandparents, Amos and Mary Shirk Underwood, are buried at nearby Center Quaker Meeting cemetery. (The next four generations, including my brother, Richard, are buried at Corwin.)

The next generation picked out the land adjacent to the north of Jonah's Run Church as having good air drainage, ideal for an orchard. My g-grandfather, Elihu Underwood, purchased the now Grismer farm in 1856, and his father and brother, Zephaniah, bought the farm to the north and east about the same time. They had up to 60 acres of mostly apples for almost 100 years. Just before my cousin, Paul Tomlinson, sold the farm about 1975, I paid him $2.00 for 64 apple crates and a spring wagon seat that I found in the still standing brick fruit storage building back the lane NE of JR. Pat Grismer refinished one of the crates into a neat fireplace basket for me.

Zephaniah brought an Underwood cousin, a widow Downing with three kids, from Pennsylvania, to help him serve meals for his many orchard employees. He was 51 when he married Matilda, age 17, one of the Downing kids. Her sister married a Romine in Harveysburg. She became the first woman physician in Ohio, and was a major influence on Mary Cook, a Harveysburg school girl, also becoming a physician. Their brother became a photographer in Waynesville and Xenia. He also patented auto headlights that "blinked", before someone else invented the more successful dimmer switch.

Matilda was a women's suffrage advocate and an organizer of the Anti-saloon Society that got the saloons closed in Clinton County. This was at about the same time as others, and perhaps her, started the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) nearby.

Matilda was a recorded minister at Grove Quaker Meeting, then located at the east edge of Harveysburg. There is an old Quaker cemetery behind the now east most residence on the south side of Main Street. Jim Jacobs converted the Meeting House into a residence in 1947.

In the Harveysburg Black School, I found the Minute Book of Grove Meeting. I read where, in perhaps 1890, Ed Lukens and Elihu Underwood went calling on Quakers for money and collected $3.00.

The JR cemetery was all but filled by 1870, and Colletts and others started burying their family members at Corwin. Others have wondered why it wasn't expanded. I wonder if it was because Matilda owned the land adjacent to the north-and later, also the land adjacent to the west.

Although Mom wouldn't say anything to embarrass anyone, she did tell me that Matilda sent her daughter, Ruth Anna, to Quaker Boarding School out east, so as to get her away from one of the Collett boys, because some of Colletts drank alcohol.

When their fourth child died in 1894, Matilda designed and Zephaniah soon built the Tower House to the east of JR. My mother remembered going there, fifteen years later, as a child and taking a bath in an inside bathroom, the first in the county. However, it didn't include an inside toilet, which was still considered unsanitary.

Elihu's wife, Hester Kirk, died in 1900, about the same time as his brother, Zephaniah died. Elihu soon married Matilda, his brother's widow. Elihu moved in with Matilda when they were married, thus allowing his still single son, Daniel, my grandfather, to buy his birthplace home farm, the former Gaddis Place.

At that time, Dan's sister, Kathryn, had joined Jonah's Run, and even went to Northern Theological Seminary in Chicago, expecting to become a missionary. She never got an assignment. Hers was the first wedding ever held at Jonah's Run. After her husband died, she and her two kids lived on Ridge Road, NE of Harveysburg. As our "Aunt Kitty", my Underwood cousins and I remember how she taught us to hold our hands "so water will run off a duck's back" as we learned to play the piano.

Aunt Kitty was also the long time Jonah's Run Sunday School primary class teacher. I remember that she put pennies in the Sunday School collection. She got those pennies from my parents who paid her for piano lessons. I wonder how many times some of those same pennies circulated between us. William Doster, my dad, was the long-time Jonah's Run Treasurer, and I helped him count the collection. He sometimes wrote a check and deposited it, while continuing to use the change himself.

Dan Underwood, my grandfather, never joined JR, but he did attend a JR box social with his sister, Kathryn. He purchased the box of Wilhelmina Hahn, a German Lutheran from Blanchester, then a young teacher of the school located at the south end of Katy's Lane. In 1900, the first day she taught, young Cotchum Collett climbed out the window, jumped the fence, and headed for home. Wilhelmina saw him leave. She also climbed out the window, jumped the fence, and brought him back. Cotchum was later the long time national secretary of Sigma Chi Fraternity. He built the fine brick home on the south side of SR 73 about a mile east of JR.

While teaching, Wilhelmina lived with three Collett sisters near the north end of Denny Road. When Daniel Underwood came calling, one of the sisters went upstairs where Wilhelmina was sewing her corset. "Miss Hahn, Mr. Underwood is here," one of the sisters said. "Isn't he here to see you?" she asked. "No, he's never come to see any of us," the Collett sister said. I don't know why Grand mama had a corset. I've heard that Grand papa's fingers touched when he put his hands around her waist.