(Submitted by D. Howard Doster to Webmaster and Newspaper at the same time.)

     The 147th Collett-McKay Picnic was held on August 11 at the family's four-acre picnic site at 5353 Gurneyville Road, NW of Wilmington, Ohio. 162 persons from fourteen states signed the register, again under a great maple tree. Trustee Steve Collett called the group together and praised Steve McKay and others for preparing the picnic site so beautifully. Steve announced that McKay Collett was stepping down as a Trustee, and asked for volunteers. (McKay lives in the Hole-in-the-Woods house that Johnathan Collett, my g-g grandfather, built for Sarah McKay, his 1823 bride.) Steve also announced that all signatures in the three picnic registers had been recorded on a CD by Wilmington College Quaker Records.
     Here's some of our history. George, Francis, Levy Duffy, Jacob Franklin, Sarah, Margaret, Virginia, and Mariah McKay, eight of Moses and Abigail Shinn McKay's kids, inherited Clinton County land near the picnic site from Moses who died in 1828. Robert got land in Virginia. Mary Elizabeth inherited nearby Greene County land, and Rachel, Sarah, Jonas Tilden, and Levy Duffy got Warren County land. Jonas Tilden got the house at now 9363 New Burlington Road, Waynesville, Ohio, 45068, in Warren County, where I'm sitting.
     Just before the picnic, I met with Dr. Maxine Hamilton who now lives with her son, Tom, in the former George McKay house on New Burlington Road in Clinton County, which surrounds the log cabin where George brought his bride, Mary M. Ferguson. He traveled back to Virginia, and brought her here as his 1823 bride. She became a Mercer Run Baptist before he joined. Abigail, their daughter, married Levi Duffy Shambaugh. (But, Howard Shambaugh, perhaps Abigail and Levi's descendant, was born on what appears to me to be Francis McKay's former land. Who can help me understand the land transfers? And, who can identify a Levi Duffy, who witnessed an 1818 contract in Virginia between Moses McKay and Arvenia Gaston, a free woman of color?)
     Maxine said she had seen a map of Moses' land long ago. Your recorder and Maxine agreed to identify more former McKay and Collett properties in the area before the next picnic. I made a copy of Moses McKay's will, now in the Lebanon court house. Maybe some of you will bring photos of family houses to the next picnic. Who has a photo of the railroad building with the words "McKay Station"? Was it on McKay Road? Which McKay first owned this land?
     In 1805, Moses bought 1,000 acres in Virginia Military District Survey 2280, in now Chester Township, including the present picnic site, from the surveyor, Nathaniel Massie. In 1819, Moses McKay bought several hundred acres in Survey 3908, adjacent to the north, from his cousin, Jesse McKay, who was also his wife Abigail's half-brother. (After George Shinn, Abigail's father died, Rachel Ridgeway, her mother, married Jacob McKay, Moses' uncle. The new couple had sons, Jesse and Jacob. (See Michael McKay's website at www.robertMacKayclan.com, and Hinshaw's Quaker Records.)
     Oh, Jane Ridgeway McKay, Moses' mother, and Rachel Ridgeway were sisters; thus, Rachel was his aunt, as well as his wife's mother. What fun! What more fun we'll have when we try to identify how various Haines family members were neighbors of, and married into, both McKay and Collett families in Virginia, just before they came to SW Ohio.
     Francis McKay inherited some of Moses' 1819 purchase. In a Clinton County History, I've learned he helped start Mt Pisgah Methodist Church, on some of his land, in the little field on the north side of now Gurneyville Road, just east of Stingley Road. The church closed by 1845, but, starting in 1866, the first five Collett-McKay Picnics were held at the church site, until Francis died and was buried there in 1871. From then on, the picnic has been held slightly SE on the present 4-acre site that was part of the first 1,000 acres Moses McKay purchased.
     At the 2012 picnic, Kathryn Hackney Luby told your recorder to look in the former 1830 Francis McKay house, on Gurneyville Road, just west of where Stingley Road T's into Gurneyville Road, NW of the picnic site, for an underground railroad hiding spot behind a plank on the front stairs. But, the present owner and I did not find the hiding place. Family genealogist Sara McKay Smith and her school teacher husband, Harley, lived here for many years. Sara's grandfather was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Harley once told a local book club that the persons along the nearby Bullskin Trace, which ran north through New Burlington and Xenia, aided more slaves than persons along any other route. Did he indicate there were 86 station houses south of Xenia? (Who has a written copy of some of Harley's stories?) I wonder if Harley included our present home, and if he included the so-called Nickerson House, the house where Revolutionary Daniel Collett's sister, Sarah Collett Ashby, lived on the farm Daniel gave her in survey 1994, a half-mile east of the Bullskin Trace. Silas Ashby, her then deceased husband, had fought with General George Rogers Clark at Vincennes, etc., during the Revolution. Aaron Collett, her brother, was scalped by Indians shortly after Sarah, and her brothers, Aaron and John, went from northern Virginia to Kentucky, likely before 1780.
     The Bullskin Trace, a former woods buffalo and Shawnee trail, and later, in 1807, the first Ohio State Road, ran south across the Ohio River to a Kentucky salt lick where Daniel Boone was captured in 1779, before the Indians brought him north to Old Chillicothe, their village on the Trace, where Tecumseh was born in 1769, four miles north of Xenia. Oh, I was born on the Trace in 1933, on my mother's Underwood family farm, adjacent NW to Jonah's Run Baptist Church. I played Harveysburg school baseball in a woods buffalo wallow in Revolutionary Daniel's pasture, north of his 1816 home and SE of Jonah's Run Baptist Church.
     I've found where Abigail Shinn McKay was removed from Caesar Creek Quaker Meeting about 1821 for joining a sect. Recently, I've read in Lucinda McKay's story, "Twentieth Century Mediation" that Dr. Maxine gave me, where she and Moses joined the Methodist Church in Mt Holly, two miles west of their home, across the Little Miami River, in 1821. During Picnic Week, I took four groups to their 1828 burial site there, beside their daughter, Virginia, the first wife of Revolutionary Daniel Collett's son, Daniel. Virginia, died a year before her father, Moses McKay died, giving birth to a son, also named Daniel Collett. This baby Daniel, a grandson of Revolutionary Daniel Collett, inherited the present picnic site from his grandfather, Moses McKay.
     We also went to the 1835 burial site of Revolutionary War Daniel Collett, never a Quaker (but the first president, in 1822, of the Clinton County Bible Society), at Caesar Creek Quaker Meeting, a mile east of Moses', and now, our, home. I'm still looking for the 1826 burial site of his Quaker wife, Mary Haines Collett, and also for her son, Moses Collett, who died in 1823, and his Quaker wife, Rebecca Haines Collett, who died in 1847. Moses Collett owned land just east of the Little Miami River in both Warren and Greene County, and lived in Greene, just SE of now Roxanna, where Revolutionary Daniel and his wife and son, Johnathan may have stayed in 1812-13 before they bought land in survey 1994. Both Mary Haines Collett, Revolutionary Daniel's wife, and Rebecca Haines Collett, her son Moses Collett's wife, were members of Caesar Creek Quaker Meeting. (Joshua, Revolutionary Daniel's oldest son, was one of the first four persons in Lebanon in 1802. An attorney, he soon served as a Justice on the Ohio Supreme Court.)
     I also took the groups to the 1806 grave site at Waynesville Quaker Meeting of Moses McKay's mother, Jane Ridgeway McKay, my g-g-g-g grandmother, and perhaps yours' also. Moses brought his just widowed mother here in 1805. The next year she married Joseph Cloud, the first recorded minister in Waynesville's Miami Meeting; then died two months later.
     Finally, I took some of the groups to Jonah's Run Baptist Church in southern Chester Township, started by Collett's in 1838, on a sliver of vacant land, just south of survey 770 and north of survey 1994. We read the tombstone stories of Isaac, Johnathan (and Sarah McKay Collett, my g-g grandparents), Aaron, Mercy, and Daniel (and Charity Hackney, his second wife) Collett, children of Revolutionary Daniel and Mary Haines Collett; Mary Ann Gaddis McKay, the wife of Levi Duffy McKay, Moses and Abigail's youngest son; Mary Elizabeth McKay Hackney, the youngest daughter of Moses and Abigail McKay, and the wife of Edward Bond Hackney. We saw the stones for Revolutionary Daniel's grandson, Daniel Haines Collett and his wife, Mariah McKay Collett, another of Moses McKay's daughters. Mariah, who died in 1882, was perhaps the last "Collett" to be buried here. The next generations are mostly buried at Miami Cemetery in nearby Corwin.
     At Jonah's Run, we also viewed the grave of Aaron Collett's daughter, Mary Collett Austin, the mother of Mattie, who married John Magee. (Mary may have inherited the house where picnic trustee, John Mothersole, now lives from her father, Aaron Collett, who would have inherited it from Revolutionary Daniel, if it was part of his 1815 purchase.) While searching other cemeteries, I found the top of the broken stone of Aaron's daughter, Martha, lying on the surface in the UB cemetery in nearby Harveysburg, although according to earlier records, she is buried at Jonah's Run.
     Finally, at Jonah's Run, we also saw the graves of John and Hannah Leap Denny, the parents of John P. Denny, who married Martha Collett, the g-grandmother of Charles Denny, and Ellen (now Gilbert), Steve, Rachel, Margaret (now Raabe) Pidgeon; as well as three Collett-McKay cousins, including another Daniel Collett, who were killed in the Civil War. This Daniel was the son of a Daniel who was the son of Isaac, the son of Revolutionary Daniel. (My first name is Daniel. I have a son named Daniel who has a son named Daniel.)
     I now own the southern-most 80 acres of the 2358 acres in survey 1994 that Revolutionary War Daniel and Mary Haines Collett bought in now Chester and Adams Township in 1814. I just learned they bought another 971 acres the next year, in survey 1557, adjacent to the east of Moses McKay's 1805 purchase.
     The McKay's and Collett's apparently knew each other long before four of Moses' kids married four Collett's in the 1820's. What fun to learn and share! Bring your stories next year. Better yet, write me at the above address, or email me now. Maybe volunteer to help prepare materials for the 175th Jonah's Run or the 150th Collett-McKay.
     First-time picnic attendees included Amanda Collett Corrie, about to return to duty in the Middle East. Amanda's mother, Ellen-here for the second time, cried when she found her mother's signature in the 1926 register, perhaps the only time her mother attended. Other first-timers included Bruce and Rita McDonald, Jimmy Lyons, Logan Blacker, Matt Puckett, Drew St John, Lily Kelly, and Dean Hanson-the youngest attendee, born April 24.
     Cousins deceased this year included Mary Edith Doster Cline, Caroline Cossum Powell, and Frank Clever.
     Out of state cousins included Bob and Luella Ramsey from Opelika, Alabama; Raymond, Mary, and Virginia Sell, Boulder, Colorado; Chuck, Chad, and Karen Fabian, Des Plaines, Illinois; Pierpaolo, Lena, Stella, and Max Polzonetti, South Bend, Indiana; Susan Doster and Rick Mertens, West Lafayette, Indiana; James and Patricia Giesting and their grandsons, Logan and Riley, Glenwood, Iowa; Megan, Ben, and Lily Kelley, Lexington, Ky; and David Sell, Richmond, Ky; Cynthia and Dave Doster, Novi, Michigan; Jimmy Doster, Raleigh, NC; Marilyn Talmage, Nashville, Tenn.; Bruce and Rita McDonald, Great Falls, Va.; Michael McKay, Maria and Sierra Brock, Winchester, Va.; Ellen and Amanda Corrie, Fairfax Station, Va.; Gary, Elizabeth, Megan, Charlie, Ben, Schow, Taylorsville, Ut.; Cora Collette Breuner, Seattle, Wash; Roger Magee, Sequin, Wash.; Ellen Magee and Guy Fields, Madison, Wisc.

     English Club met on June 1 at the Cape May Campus Center with hostesses Lois Hackney and Susan Henry. African violets centered each table.
     Members having birthdays in June are Maryan Winsor, Barbara Davis and Susan Henry. Roll call was answered with members telling the countries of their families origins.
     Lois Hackney changed into an old time Quaker outfit to tell about Caesar's Creek Pioneer Village. When the first settlers came to the Northwest Territory, it was a deep wilderness. Two hundred years later, it is Caesar's Creek Lake. Volunteers made plans to move old buildings from sites that would be swallowed up by the lake. Most were disassembled and rebuilt on land at Pioneer Village.
     Hackney told about the buildings that were moved to Pioneer Village.
     The Toll House - the Lukens house - has two stories and a basement. The barn was originally built in 1803, the year that Ohio became a state. In 1814, the Daniel Collett house was built on 4,000 acres. He married Mary McKay. Descendants of this family meet annually for the Collett McKay picnic.
     The Saddlebag house was owned by the Hawkins family. The Heighway cabin is the oldest structure in the village. It dates back to 1793 to 1795 when the first settlers arrived. There is a store, a school and the Friends Meetinghouse, which was moved intact, for seven miles to its current location. The move cost $8,000. There are two doors in the meetinghouse. One for men and the other for women.
     Hackney told a story about a runaway slave who hid in the Meetinghouse one Sunday morning during worship. The slave catchers came right into the building at the time of silent worship, demanding the return of the fugitive. It was illegal to harbor a runaway slave at this time in history. He left empty handed and the Quakers helped this soul to the next stop on the Underground Railroad.
     The Christmas Walk is held the first Saturday evening in December at Pioneer Village.
     Members present at the meeting were Donna Barnhart, Daphne Blackburn, Phyllis Borror, Doris Conley, Claudia Damschroder, Barbara Davis, Lois Hackney, Susan Henry, Anne Lynch, Sue Miars, Barbara Ostermeier, Joyce Peters, Jane Petty, Judy Sargent, Barbara Vance and Avonelle Williams.