CHAPTER IV. SCOTCH-IRISH In IRELAND And In AMERICA by ANDREW PHELPS McCORMICK, 1897

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McKENZIE.


	My mother's maiden name was Agnes Louisa McKenzie.  She was called Louisa in 
her parents' family and by her acquaintances, and when my father, accompanied by her 
brother, applied to the proper officer for the marriage license, her name was given as Miss 
Louisa McKenzie, and on the officer's asking if she had not more than one christian name, 
the brother answered, "Yes, her other name is Agnes."  Whereupon the license was written 
authorizing the union of Joseph M. McCormick, and Louisa A. McKenzie in marriage.  
Hence her name as ever after used became Louisa A. McCormick.  Her father was born in 
North Carolina, but his father was born in Scotland.  He was of the Clan McKenzie, then 
next in numbers and prowess to the Clan Campbell.  The founder of the clan, Sir Kenneth 
McKenzie, was knighted by King James for gallantry in protecting the monarch from the 
fury of a wounded stag when the King was hunting in the wilds of Comarty.  The family 
coat of arms is a burning mountain with the motto, "Illumo non uro."  On the obverse side is 
a stag's head.

	My mother's great-grandfather McKenzie married a daughter of Lord Ross, of 
Scotland, in 1720.  His lordship was so angered by his daughter's marrying a man without a 
title that he threatened to disinherit her, and for a time renounced her.  Mr. McKenzie was a 
man of sufficient means to own or charter an ocean-going ship, and he procured a cargo of 
emigrants to take out to America.  Dr. William Henry Foote, in his sketches historical and 
biographical of North Carolina, says:  "When Alexander Clark emigrated to America he 
paid the passage of many poor emigrants, and gave them employment till the price was 
repaid.  Many companies of Scotchmen came to America in a similar way, some person of 
property paying their passage and giving them employ upon their lands until they were able 
to set up for themselves."  This is true, but it is a soft way to put it.  At that time many 
persons in honest poverty, not in Scotland only but in the other British Isles, and across the 
Channel, sought to better their worldly fortunes and escape the restraints put on their 
conscience by emigrating to America, and gladly availed themselves of the privilege the 
laws then in force gave them of making binding contracts to serve as laborers in America 
under stipulated or established regulations, till the passage-price was paid.  Such contracts 
were then not uncommon; they were enforced, and many most worthy young persons of 
both sexes were introduced in that way into the Colonies, where work was plenty, laborers 
scarce and wages good.  Sometimes the service was to be, and was, rendered the party with 
whom the contract was made, but perhaps more often the contracts were sold at the port of 
discharge to the highest bidder -- that is, to the highest acceptable purchaser who would pay 
the amount of the passage money for the shortest period of such service as was specified in 
the contract.  The law of master and servant protected and bound both master and servant.  
Captain McKenzie's emigrant passengers came under contracts of this kind.  He entered the 
Delaware River, and having disposed of his cargo in the due course of trade, invested a part 
of his profits in unimproved lands on the east side of the Delaware River, just opposite to 
the village of brotherly love.  He returned with his ship to Scotland, intending to procure 
another cargo of immigrants to settle his newly acquired estate on the Delaware, but during 
his absence in America his noble father-in-law had become reconciled to the daughter's 
marriage and willing to embrace his untitled children in his affection, and in his will, so that 
an inviting field was opened to Mr. McKenzie in Scotland.  His attention was thus diverted 
from his speculative investment in America, then of small value, and given to engrossing 
interests in his native land.  He settled in Armach County, near Lock Lear.  Here my 
mother's grandfather, Andrew McKenzie, was born in 1727.

	When Charles Edward landed and made insurrection in 1745, the head of the 
McKenzies was in Parliament, and all of the older men of substance and leading rank in the 
clan were too much interested in the existing order of things under the House of Hanover to 
risk an authorized rising, but very many of the young men who had no such reasons to be 
conservative, were active friends and supporters of the gallant youth whom the whole clan 
loved as their rightful Liege.  Among the most ardent of his followers was Andrew 
McKenzie, then a lad of nineteen.  After the wreck of that prince's fortunes, at Culloden, 
April 16, 1746, young McKenzie found the air of County Antrim, Ireland, more salubrious 
for him than that of Scotia.  In Ireland he followed the business of a brewer, in which he 
prospered.  He married there and maintained a sumptuous style of living, and was held in 
consideration and esteem, as was a few years later, in London, the rich brewer, Mr. Thrale, 
the friend of Dr. Samuel Johnson.  About the year 1760, he emigrated from Ireland to 
America, and stopped first in New Jersey, with the view to reclaim the lands his father had 
acquired in 1720.  He found that, through the lapse and accident of forty years, and the 
neglect or bad faith of agents with whom him father's deeds had been deposited, these 
muniments of title had been lost or destroyed.  He obtained from Lord Granville's agent a 
grant of land in North Carolina, situated on both sides of Third Creek, just below the point 
where that stream receives on its south side a tributary named on Sharp's map, "Back 
Creek."  On this grant of land, at a point about one-quarter of a mile north of Third Creek, 
and two miles due south from the old "Fourth Creek Meeting House," Mr. McKenzie 
established the home of his family.  His wife, and their several children older than my 
grandfather, with himself, then composed his family.  After this settlement, and in this 
home, some time in the year 1771 -- the exact date is not now known -- my grandfather was 
born.  The oldest child was a son named William.  There were then, or later, two daughters, 
named Isabella and Catherine, and another son named James.  In 1780 the War for 
Independence was intensely flagrant in the South.  Georgia and South Carolina were in the 
hands of the enemy, and the victorious British were pressing northward to the invasion of 
North Carolina.  Mr. McKenzie and his oldest son, William, were the army under General 
Gates, probably not in the same company or regiment.  They were both at Camden; the 
father was wounded in that battle, but escaped capture; the son was captured, and a few days 
after the battle, died in a hospital near that disastrous field -- whether from wounds or from 
disease contracted in the service we do not know.  After the war Mr. McKenzie received 
two grants of land from the State of North Carolina, and acquired other lands by purchase 
from private parties.  His principal active business was growing grain and distilling spirits, 
but in the absence of a sufficient volume of sound money to serve as a circulating medium, 
he had to accept in barter live stock and other movables in exchange for that portion of the 
product of his distilleries which supplied the local market. In this way his son, James, 
became trained as a dealer in domestic animals, horses, neat cattle, sheep, etc., which he 
drove to distant markets, the chief and nearest of which were Philadelphia and Charleston.  
While thus engaged, in the year 1800, he fell sick in South Carolina, and died near or in 
Charleston.  He had remained a bachelor.  The daughter, Isabella, married a man named 
Johnson, and soon thereafter moved with her husband to Tennessee.  The other daughter, 
Catherine, married a man named Lotta, who some years later settled in Ohio.  I have not 
succeeded in tracing either of these families after their migration West.  The remaining 
child, Andrew -- my grandfather -- seems to have been inducted into the active management 
of his father's home business at an early age.  In his twenty-seventh year, 1798, he married 
Elizabeth (Betsy) Stevenson, the youngest child of the Senior Elder William Stevenson, and 
received with his wife a generous share of Mr. Stevenson's large landed estate.  By the year 
1800, when James McKenzie died, the sisters had received the portion of goods that falleth 
to each child and had taken their respective journeys into a far country.  The home business 
grew to be Andrew's.  In a few years more he became the "McKenzie," his father still 
retaining the title to the homeplace and a few slaves, and possibly -- perhaps probably -- an 
interest in the manufacture and sale of the "spirits" produced.  Andrew was a full-blooded 
Scotch-Irishman, in which the distinguishing qualities of the Scotch and of the Irish gentry 
were admirably blended.  He had the popular manners and openhanded generosity of the 
one and the plucky purpose of the other.  In physique he was a tall blonde blue-eyed 
Caledonian.  His wife, like her father, was low of stature.  Their first child, their daughter 
Eveline, unshod, stood only five feet and one inch in height.  The four others of their 
daughters that I knew were over five feet six inches, and the youngest of these, Jane, was 
over five feet eight inches tall.  Their third child, the oldest son, William Washington, was 
six feet and one and one-half inches, and the other son -- their seventh child --  James 
Lincoln, was two inches taller than his brother.  The tallest of the grandsons, James Andrew 
McKenzie, is much over six feet, but as I have not his exact measure, and as he is still living 
and widely known, I cannot venture to be more precise.  By advancements from his father 
and from his father-in-law, supplemented perhaps by his purchases from others, Mr. 
McKenzie had acquired and owned at one time, and cultivated more than one thousand 
acres of the then still virgin soil in that fine farming country.  He operated four large 
distilleries.  He kept his own wagon train constantly on the road between his home and 
Charleston carrying his spirits to market and bringing in supplies.  In 1803 he built on his 
Stevenson what was in that day and in that section a palatial mansion-house, not as large or 
as grand as Washington's regal palace at Mount Vernon, or as Marshall's baronial academic 
castle at Buck Pond, in Kentucky, or, perhaps, as a number of the "great" houses in the coast 
plantation districts of North Carolina, but it was large and imposing for this Piedmont 
country in 1803, and was constructed so substantially as to both its material and 
workmanship that it is standing to-day, as ample and comfortable as it was when the beauty 
and chivalry of this region first gathered there at the house-warming, with sounds of revelry 
by night, with flowing bowl kept ever full, a feast incomparable and lamps looking brightly 
down on fair women and brave men as they tripped the light fantastic toe.  My wife and 
children, in company with Judge W.G. Ewing, of Chicago, and myself, visited this home in 
July, 1896.  It is now owned by a very aged widow lady, who occupies it with some of her 
children and grandchildren.  She told us that she had lived in it from her girlhood, beginning 
in 1840, and that in the intervening fifty-six years it had not received -- as it did not need -- 
any considerable repairs.  The basement of the house and the foundations for its outside 
chimneys are built of stone.  The chimneys are built with brick and mortar.  The rest of the 
building is of wood.  On the outside face of the chimney at the south end of the house, at the 
distance of twenty-five feet from the ground, in the seventh course of bricks from and below 
the point where the body of the chimney stops and brick works begins to be drawn in to 
form the stem that extends on and upward to a sufficient height above the comb of the roof, 
there is chiselled the words and figures, "June 8th, 1803."  That is the date of birth of 
Andrew McKenzie's oldest son, the late Judge William Washington McKenzie, of Christian 
County, Kentucky.  The bricks are tough, compact, hard-burned red clay.  The chimneys 
have not been painted or washed with liquid lime or cement.  The others surfaces of the 
brick are still bright and smooth; their edges are sharp.  The lines of mortar that knit them 
together have not been retouched, have lost somewhat the gloss of the trowel, but are full 
and perfect.  The top of the stem was finished without a collar or capping of any kind, and 
the last or finishing course is broken, and half of it has disappeared.  I did not go into the 
basement or into the second story.  In this house my mother was born, August 31, 1807.  
Mr. McKenzie's business and the bounds of his hospitality continued to extend and give him 
joy, shared bounteously with the host of those who "will praise thee when thou doest well to 
thyself," till the evil days of the embargo and of the second war with England reached even 
this uncommercial section.  Then -- not all at once, but by degrees -- he began to realize that 
his business was too much extended, and he was too much entangled with others whose 
affairs, in worse conditions than his, had been held up by the help of his cash, and, what was 
worse, by the help of his credit.  As the situation developed, or became known to him, he 
promptly met it bravely and wisely.  He was his own liquidator.  All of his obligations, both 
as principal and as endorser, were fully met.  By 1814 the liquidation was completed, his 
debts all discharged and his property nearly all gone.  In the fall of that year he took his 
family, consisting of his father -- then in the eighty-seventh year and long a widower -- his 
wife with their babe at the breast, and their seven other children, the oldest of whom was a 
daughter not yet fifteen, and only two of whom were sons -- the oldest eleven and the other 
not yet three years old -- with the little remnant of their movable property, and went with a 
number of his friends, who had encountered like but not equal reverses, to make a new start 
in the then far West.  He stopped first in Christian County, Kentucky, where he remained 
two years prospecting.  He then settled at a point on the Tennessee River which is now in 
Trigg County, then formed a part of Caldwell County.  During a flood in that river, in the 
spring of 1817, he was drowned.  His body was recovered and buried on a hill on the bank 
of the Tennessee River near Egners Ferry.  He had not become well re-established in 
business.  The two years of interregnum or of casual effort had, owing to the size and 
character and tastes of his family, consumed nearly or quite all of the remnant of means 
which he had brought from North Carolina.  The oldest two of his children were daughters, 
and yet minors.  His father, now ninety years old, had been for many years past a member of 
the son's family, and had given no thought to any business, though he still retained, as he 
continued to do for yet ten years longer, activity both of body and of mind to a degree most 
rare at such an advanced age.  But the fatherless and the widow were visited in their 
affliction.  Her brother, James Stevenson, ten years her senior, lived not far away, at Blue 
Water, in Christian County.  He efficiently settled her husband's succession.  He generously 
and most kindly procured for her family a home near his own, and continued his fraternal 
and fatherly succor as long as it was needed and to the full measure of her need and wish.

	My grandparents, Andrew and Elizabeth McKenzie, had nine children.  One son died 
in North Carolina in early infancy.  I do not know if he was ever baptized or named; I think 
he was not, as I have no recollection of having heard his name.  One daughter, Amanda, 
died unmarried just after reaching womanhood, in the eighteenth year of her age.  On 
December 1, 1818, their oldest child, Mary Eveline, born October 1, 1799, married Josiah 
Hughes Bell, and immediately went with her husband to Natchitoches, Louisiana, and a few 
years later to Texas, then a province of Mexico.  As these are great-grandparents of my 
children, and bore a prominent historic part in the early settlement of Texas by the North 
Americans, they will receive merited and more extended mention in a separate chapter.  In 
1825, the second child, Elizabeth Lucinda, born October 30, 1801, married Francis Marion 
Girand.  He was born in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, in 1800, and moved to Kentucky 
in 1820.  He was a tailor by trade, well trained and skilled in his art, who had and held a 
good run of custom.  He was a dark-haired, brown-eyed, dark-complexioned young man, 
full of fun and fond of sport, well-read and gifted in conversation.  He had not the Scotch or 
the Scotch-Irish thrift; was improvident of his time and earnings, kept his home bright, but 
did not increase his store, except his children, who come on apace.  He died July 30, 1835.  
For several years before my mother's marriage she made her home in Mr. Girand's family, 
and assisted her sister in the care of the infant children.  The oldest of these children, to 
whom was given the name James Cushman, was my mother's special charge, and became 
the object of her affection to a degree next to that which she bestowed later on her only son.  
This home, though humble, was a very happy one while Mr. Girand lived, and when he who 
was its stay was taken, the bereaved widow received from her brother such generous care 
and aid as their mother had received under similar circumstances.  Her son, James 
Cushman, went to Texas i his eighteenth year, and for several years, lived sometimes with 
my parents and at other times with the family of his aunt, Madam Bell -- as the one or the 
other family could furnish him suitable employment.  He developed judgment and skill in 
the management of plantation work, and was held in high esteem as a worthy useful citizen. 
At the outbreak of the Civil War he entered the Confederate Army as a volunteer.  When 
Texas was threatened with invasion in the fall of 1863, and the Confederate forces were 
massed on the coast, his command was stationed in Matagorda County.  The weather was 
unusually severe during that winter, and while engaged on certain detached service 
Cushman was greatly exposed.  He passed my father's house one day with a chill on him, 
but could not be prevailed on to stop, as his orders were urgent and required him to go to 
Columbia.  Having executed his orders, he got to the home of Mr. Thaddeus Bell, who lived 
near Columbia, where he took to his bed and died in a few days.  He was in the prime of 
vigorous manhood, was over six feet in stature, weighed 180 pounds, stood erect as a 
plummet; was a noble, handsome, brave, good man.  In the earlier years of his manhood he 
was favorite with the fair, but he never married.  Her second child and oldest daughter, 
Amanda Louisa Girand, born in January, 1829, I met in July, 1850, as was much with 
during my brief visit to Christian County at that time.  She strongly resembled my sister, 
Sarah, in person, temperament and action.  She had inherited in full measure from her father 
his capacity for fun and frolic and ready talk.  In October of that year, she married Mr. 
Graham Barclay, whom I never saw, and since which time I have not seen her and have no 
personal knowledge of her environment, but am persuaded that whatever may now be, or 
may have been, its other features, it is and has always been sunny.  Her husband died in 
1880.  She resides in Graves County, Kentucky.  She is the mother of five sons and one 
daughter.  Mrs. Girand's third child, Francis Washington Girard, born January 9, 1834, came 
to Texas in 1852, became a clerk in the General Land Office of the State in 1857, married 
Miss Anna Barton Crozier, March 15, 1860, and became the happy head of a family, which 
grew to be a large one.  To them were born ten children, of whom seven are living.  His 
wife died January 11, 1894.  For eighteen years he has been Deputy Clerk of the United 
States Circuit and District Courts for the Northern District of Texas, and resides in Abilene, 
in Taylor County.  In January, 1853, Mrs. Girand married Mr. Jacob Sherrill, a nephew of 
Mr. Enos Sherrill, who married my father's aunt, Elizabeth McCormick.  Mr. Jacob 
Sherrill's first wife was Elizabeth Stevenson, daughter of Joseph Stevenson, who was a 
brother of my grandmother McKenzie: and thus his first wife was a first cousin of his 
second wife and of my mother.  By his first marriage, Uncle Jacob Sherrill was the father of 
a son, Pinkney E. Sherrill, who married Mary Washington McKenzie, and was also the 
father of a daughter, Elenora Sherrill, who a short time before her father's second marriage 
had married William E. Crews, and settled in Brazoria County, Texas, where her children 
now reside and exert a large local influence as leading citizens.  Mr. Sherrill had a good 
farm, on which he lived, adjoining my Uncle Long's, at Blue Water.  He had a well 
appointed home, with a number of trained and trusty slaves, sufficient to tend the fields and 
do all the domestic work of his family.  His children had all married and left him, Mrs. 
Crews being the last to go.  My aunt Lucinda -- now Mrs. Sherrill -- had still with her one 
unmarried daughter, Elizabeth Eveline (Bettie) Girand, born in 1831, and one son, Fidelio 
McKenzie Girand, born October 13, 1835.  These children she took with her to her new 
home, where, in July, 1853, my parents, my sister and I enjoyed delightful hospitality.  This 
unmarried daughter, Bettie, then in the bloom of her mature beauty -- different in style from 
her sisters, but no less attractive -- was the light of the home in which her stepfather 
appeared to rejoice.  She was tall and spare, but in perfect health.  Early in 1857 she 
contracted a cold, which settled on her lungs and developed a cough which alarmed her 
family.  The home of my parents had become childless by the marriage of their only 
daughter, and they invited Cousin Bettie to come and spend the winter with them on the 
Gulf Coast.  In the fall of that year, she, with her youngest brother, visited Texas and spent 
the winter with my parents and with her other kindred in Brazoria County.  She and they 
enjoyed the visit, but her lungs were not relieved.  In the beginning of the next summer she 
returned to her mother's home near Bluewater, where she survived only a few weeks.  Her 
youngest brother, who had accompanied her to Texas, took charge of the plantation of 
Judge George Quinan, in Wharton County, in which charge he continued to the mutual 
advantage and satisfaction of the owner and the manager, till the breaking out of the Civil 
War, when he joined the Confederate Army, among the first of the volunteers, and went 
with the 8th Texas Calvary -- popularly known as the Texas Rangers -- to join the Army of 
the Cumberland then gathering at Bowling Green, Kentucky.  He never resumed his 
residence in Texas.  On October 17, 1879, he married his cousin Sophia Eliza (Pet) 
McKenzie and came with her to Texas, expecting to remain, but after a few months returned 
to Christian County, Kentucky; where they still reside.  Mrs. Sherrill died in Christian 
County, Kentucky, in December, 1874.

	My grandfather McKenzie's third child, William Washington, was born, as already 
mentioned, June 8, 1803.  In January, 1827, he married his cousin, Mary Caroline 
Stevenson, a daughter of Moses Stevenson and Annie Ewing Stevenson.  She died in 
September, 1838, and on the 27th day of July, 1839, he married Isabella Caroline Ewing, 
who was a daughter of Sophia G. and Adlai Ewing, and a niece of Annie Ewing Stevenson, 
the mother of Mr. McKenzie's first wife, Mary Caroline.  He had five sons and four 
daughters, all of whom lived to mature years, and married.  One of his sons, James Andrew 
McKenzie, lived in my family from October, 1859, to September, 1861, and read law in my 
office in Brazoria County, Texas.  He left my house on the 2nd day of September, 1861, to 
march with his company, the Archer Grays, to join the Confederate Army under Albert 
Sidney Johnston in Kentucky.  That son is now United States Minister to Peru.  Judge 
William Washington McKenzie died on the 19th day of March, 1894.  In 

a private letter to me, written at Lima, Peru, March 21, 1894, the distinguished son thus 
refers to his father:

	"I have a letter to-day from my sister, Mrs. Moss, telling me my dear father, now in his 
91st year, is in rapidly declining health.  He has no particular disease, but is just simply 
wearing out.  The end is near at hand.  A great life, great in its simplicity and in its 
honor, is fast fading away.  His having lived in this world is an honor to the human race, 
and his death will be a splendid triumph of simple christian faith.  He never did a 
dishonorable act in his life.  In my intercourse of fifty years with him I never heard him 
utter a word or sentiment that might not with propriety have been heard by a woman.  He 
had strong convictions, and was not slow in giving them expression, both in word and act, 
but there was nothing of the dogmatist or Pharisee in his mental or moral make-up.  He 
believed that truth was the basic sub-structure upon which all true christian character rested.
"The man that speaks the truth is greater than a king," was with him a favorite and frequent 
quotation.  During his life his wants were simple and his actions always governed by an 
inexorable unswerving sense of right.  He never pretended to be anything other than he was.  
He never claimed any knowledge he did not possess.  He made no effort to impress the world 
that the was a good man; he did what he thought to be right, and let the consequences 
take care of themselves.  He was a born conservative.  He was so tolerant of the views of 
those who differed from him that he found excuses for the erring in ascribing to them good 
intentions, and strove to lead them into light by example rather by precept.  He despised 
shams and hypocrites, and loved good faith and fair dealing.  His early life was one of 
labor and privation, and his education was limited by the narrowness of his circumstances, 
but he loved music, literature and art, and was a great reader of history and the achievements 
of the English-speaking race.  He was religious without bigotry and pious with pretense.  
He was firm without arrogance, and forbearing without weakness, -- a patient, gentle christian 
man, who loved his country, his family, his friends, his fellow-men and his God.  We shall 
not soon look upon his like again.  I feel that you will excuse this somewhat extended 
analysis of my father's character, as your mother was his sister."

	In his youth he had learned the tanner's trade, and had, soon after he attained 
manhood, established himself in that business, which he conducted successfully during the 
whole period of his active business life.  His was the first tan-yard I ever saw.  Its features 
were as interesting to me as they were new, and the memory of the impression they made on 
me is fresh and distinct.  I recall most vividly the literally one-horse-power bark mill, with 
old "Moll," whose hair had once been dark but was now grown gray in the service, 
harnessed and tethered to her place at one end of the lever, where she seemed to have solved 
the problem of perpetual motion, and along, slim, barefooted, bare-shanked, very blonde 
ten-year-old boy perched astride the other end of the lever, with his back toward old Moll 
and his eye on the grinding grist, holding in his left hand one end of a stick of tan bark, the 
other end of which was feeding across and resting on the edge of the cast-iron hopper that 
went around with the lever, and with a hammer in his right hand chipping off pieces of the 
bark of the regulation size, and causing them to drop with schedule regularity into the 
revolving hopper.  Even then this miller was as good at wit and humor as he was at work.  I 
suspect he had not had that measure of work which makes "Jack a dull boy."  The boy is 
father to the man, and this one (now Minister to Peru) was then bright, handsome and hard 
to match.  I have mentioned in a previous chapter that Mr. McKenzie at the age of twenty-
seven was elected and ordained a ruling elder in the "Little River Presbyterian Church," and 
that he continued in the active exercise of that office for the period of sixty-three years.  He 
was also at an early age put in the Commission of the Peace, and exercised the common-law 
system then in force in Kentucky, conducted by orderly succession to the office of High 
Sheriff of the county.  He was senior Justice of the Peace in 1849, when the system was 
changed by the new constitution then adopted -- but for which change he would have 
succeeded to the office of Sheriff at the end of that year.  On my way from Texas to his 
home in July, 1850, I left the Cumberland River steamboat at a landing then called 
"Tobacco Port," eighteen miles from the village of Lafayette, through which my way passed 
to Mr. McKenzie's, two or three miles further on.  The road was plain from the landing to 
the village, but on leaving the village, as directed, I met a number of roads, which 
confusingly resembled the direction I had received, and, halting in doubt, was about to seek 
other direction when a bright-faced young negro man rode up, of whom I enquired: "Do you 
know the way to Mr. Washington McKenzie's house?"  With an expression of marked 
surprise, touched with a suspicion of indignation, he replied: "Whose? The Squire's?  
Everybody knows the way to his house!"  At that time the general election for state officers 
was held in that state, beginning on the first Monday in August, and there was to be such an 
election that year.  When I had exhausted the time allotted to my visit and had gone to 
Hopkinsville, the county-seat, the last week in July, to take the stage for Danville, and was 
waiting at the hotel till the hour for departure should arrive, quite a warm discussion of the 
pending canvass -- and especially of the chances of the candidates of the respective political 
parties for election to the House of Representatives of the state legislature -- arrested my 
attention, when I heard one of the disputants say to his opponent:  "If you had Squire 
McKenzie for your candidate you would have some chance to beat us, but you have no 
other man in your party that can do it."  After the Civil War, Judge McKenzie was for a 
number of years a member of the State Senate, in which body he held a seat at the time 
when his son, James Andrew, first took his seat in the other house of the State Legislature.  
Only five of his children survived him, and one of these -- his youngest son, Dr. John 
Fielding McKenzie of Leroy, Illinois -- remained for only a little while.  When James 
Andrew was studying law in my office in Texas he often said that his brother John was the 
most gifted of his father's children.  Within a year of this writing, Judge W.G. Ewing, of 
Chicago, said to me that Dr. McKenzie was a man of rare genius, learning and skill in his 
profession, possessed by the love of it, and as ardent as skillful in its practice, and that if he 
could have been induced to live in Chicago, or in any other large city, he must have attained 
reputation equal to that of the most distinguished names in the Fraternity.  While engaged in 
the preparation of this chapter, I have received a letter from the Vice-President, Adlai E. 
Stevenson, dated January 20, 1897, in which he writes:  "As you may have occasion to 
mention Dr. John F. McKenzie (who died April 13, 1896, at Leroy, Illinois), I wish to say 
that he was one of the best men I have ever known.  He was, indeed, the counterpart of his 
noble father.  We were all deeply grieved at his death."


	In July, 1850, the early morning hour of each day (Sundays excepted) found Squire 
McKenzie at his tan-yard directing or doing the work there going on at the time.  His office 
adjoining the finishing rooms was in easy call from the dwelling house, and when he with 
"the boys" answered the breakfast note which the colored cook or her mistress issued, he 
was met by a little lady fresh from her mother's hands, standing in the door with arms 
outstretched, ready to be gathered to her father's breast and kiss him good morning.  She 
was then five years old and the youngest of his children.  He called her Queen.  She seemed 
to have never borne another name.  Her title to it met universal recognition.  It did well 
become her and she bore it with charming conscious grace.  The vision of this sovereign 
bud of beauty, material flesh in form and feature, instinct with life and charm, fresh and fair 
and fragrant, stands out from the canvas of memory.  Until three years ago, when it became 
necessary to get accurate data for this record, I had not learned what name or names had 
been given her in baptism.  In here twenty-first year she married Mr. Thomas L. Moss, by 
whom she has seven living children.  She is now, in her fifty-third year, a beautiful queenly 
woman.  She is five feet eight inches in height.  She has all the natural ability of her 
eminent 
brothers, and the great force of character and innate sense of justice that distinguished her 
father.  The accidents of fortune have pressed her hard.  She has had a severe and constant 
struggle to rear her children up to the standard of her own excellence and ambition, but she 
has succeeded.  Her oldest son, John McKenzie Moss, is a lawyer of established prominence 
at Bowling Green, Kentucky.  Her youngest son, Whig -- named for Judge W.G. Ewing, of 
Chicago -- is an exceptionally bright and promising young man.  All honor to the noble 
mother, Mrs. Isabella Catherine Moss, once my royal cousin Queen McKenzie.  She resides, 
and has ever resided, in Christian County, Kentucky, on or near the old homestead, where I 
first saw her forty-seven years ago.

	Agnes Louisa, my mother, was born August 31, 1807, married January 3, 1832.  
After her husband's death she became a member of the family of her only surviving child.  
She lived a widow nearly eleven years, the dearly loved mother and grandmother in the 
family of her son, an honored mother in Israel to all the community in which she lived.  She 
died September 15, 1875.  Her dust is deposited beside that of her husband.  They were 
lovely in their lives, and in their death they are not divided.  Their life in Texas is the 
subject of the last chapter in this record.  

	My grandmother McKenzie's sixth child, Catherine Athelia, born March 23, 1809, 
married John Turley Gunnell -- then a widower with one child -- November 15, 1827.  Mr. 
Gunnell was born May 1, 1796.  They were married in Christian County, Kentucky where 
he then resided and continued to reside till April, 1834, when they removed to McLean 
County, Illinois, and settled a farm near the site of the present town of Danvers.  On this 
farm the remainder of their joint lives was spent.  In this home he died April 28, 1867, and 
she died in the same house April 9, 1891.  I visited her at this place in September, 1890.  
She was then enjoying a green old age, actively engaged in keeping house for her bachelor 
sons, John and Joseph.  My visit brought fresh to her mind the scenes of her girlhood, and 
she discoursed with delight to herself and to me of her memories of my mother and all their 
early life together.  She was the mother of nine children, whose names and dates of birth are 
given in the appendix.  Her oldest child died in his thirty-first year.  Her youngest died an 
infant in its first year.  The others are still living; two of the sons reside on the parental 
home in Illinois, and one son in an adjoining county.  The remaining son resides in Gunnison,
Colorado.  The three daughters living reside at Slater, Missouri.

	The seventh child of Andrew and Elizabeth S. McKenzie -- a son named James 
Lincoln -- was born January 12, 1812.  He settled in Texas in 1832.  In January, 1835, he 
married Mrs. Mary Ann Rivers, whose maiden name was Mary Ann Jackson.  By her he 
had one child, born in the fall of 1835.  At or very soon after the birth of this child, the 
mother died, and the tender infant was taken and cared for by Mrs. Barnes until the 
"Runaway Scrape."  it was taken into the family of Mr. Andrew Northington when the 
families in that section fled from the advancing Mexican army.  The child died soon after 
the "Runaway Scrape."  On the 17th day of January, 1839, Mr. McKenzie married Miss 
Rachel Northington, a daughter of Andrew Northington.  To them were born three children 
-- Priscilla Ann Elizabeth, November 22, 1839; Frances Louisa, September 18, 1842, and 
James Mentor, January 5, 1846, three months after the death of his father.  This son was in 
the Confederate Army, stationed at Galveston, Texas, and while in camp was taken sick and 
died May 20, 1864.  Frances Louisa died very suddenly March 9, 1861.  Their father died 
October 4, 1845.  On the 10th day of March, 1847, his widow married Mr. Joel Hudgins.  
To them were born a large company of sons, but no daughters.  The McKenzie girls were 
the only sisters in the family.  They were too young when their father died to remember 
him.  Their full brother was not born until after his father's death.  These three children were 
reared by a stepfather, but no three children ever had a better father then he was to them and 
to the children of the only one of them who had descendants.  Priscilla Ann Elizabeth (Puss) 
married Thomas W. Taylor, November 22, 1860.  Her only sister died a few months 
thereafter.  The Civil War was coming on, and Mr. and Mrs. Taylor continued to live with 
her parents.  Their first child, Joel McKenzie Taylor, was born August 2, 1862; their second 
child, James Pierson Taylor, was born September 27, 1863; their third and last child, Mentor 
Frances Taylor, was born February 17, 1866.  Mrs. Taylor died on the eighth day (24th 
February) after the birth of her last child.  Her mother still survives, and in reference to 
these three young men (Taylor) she wrote me under date October 31, 1893:  "In regard to my 
grandsons, they are the best boys you ever saw, and I am indeed proud of them."  They 
reside in Wharton County, Texas.  Their grandfather, my uncle, James Lincoln McKenzie, 
was man of most imposing presence.  His stature was six feet two and one-half inches, net.  
He was of a just an full proportion, and of a dignified, majestic bearing and carriage.  Men 
mature early in such a settlement as then existed in that part of Texas.  His business brought 
him often to Columbia, and he was frequently at my father's house.

	The youngest child of Andrew and Elizabeth S. McKenzie was their daughter Jane 
Caroline, the exact day and month of whose birth, marriage and death I cannot give.  She 
was born in 1814; she married her cousin John Fulton Stevenson in the spring of 1832, and 
came with her mother and her youngest brother, James Lincoln, to Texas some time in the 
year 1832.  Her first child, a daughter named Mary Eveline, was born August 1, 1833.  Her 
second child, a son, was born in October 1835.  She and her son died in the summer of 
1836, soon after getting back home from the "Runaway Scrape."  Her husband remained a 
widower.  He died in 1841.  Her only surviving child was reared and educated by Mrs. 
Mary Eveline Bell, as one of her own children.  In 1851, she, Mary Eveline Stevenson, 
married J.E.W. Blinn.  They resided in Texas until after the Civil War.  They then moved to 
Southern Illinois.  Mr. Blinn died a few years ago.  She is still living, but I do not know her 
address.  She reared a large family of children.  The older ones I knew well as children 
thirty years ago but cannot now correctly give their names or ages.

	When in the fall of 1832 my grandmother emigrated to Texas, where by that time the 
majority of her living children were settled, she received a headright grant of one league and 
one labor, 4605 acres, of land, but did not reconstitute her home.  Her son-in-law, Mr. Bell, 
was well established and largely prosperous in business, had ample house-room for that 
latitude and time, and desired that his mother-in-law should become and remain a member 
of his family.  This she did.  She was given her choice of rooms in the house.  Her room 
become the favorite sitting-room of the family and the resort of the young grandchildren.  
She, however, visited much with her other children, as soon as they became prepared to 
make her comfortable, and especially at my mother's home, which was only six miles 
distant from Mr. Bell's.  I had just entered my eighth year when she died, January 2, 1840; 
but I knew her then as well as I did my own mother.  My father loved and honored her.  Her 
land was located on the West Bernard, near where the railroad station of that on the Sunset 
Route is now situated.  It was then embraced in Colorado County, but is now in Wharton.  I 
did not come into market until 1884, when the cattle-raising craze was at the zenith of its 
madness.  Then her heirs, who still held it, sold it at the top of the market, for cash, at the 
price of one dollar and a quarter ($1.25) an acre.