1809-1909 Centennial Souvenir

CEDARVILLE CONGREGATION The chief historical authority on the Cedarville congregation io the time of the Civil ·War wa s Robert Charlton Reid, father of the honorable Whitelaw Reid, and for forty years an elder of the congregation and clerk of the session. From his memoir of the congregation the. following facts are gathered : The history of Cedarville congregation begins ii1 1804. In that year David Mitchell and his wife Margaret emigrated from Kentucky a~d settled on Clark's run, six miles from Xenia. They were then well stricken in years and alone-their family being all married and mostly in the Associate church. About the same year James Miller and his wife Elizabeth, from Scotland, settled in the neighborhood of•Mr. Mitchell, and these two families form– ed the first prayer-meeting of the future congregation, and were for some years the only members. Messrs. Mitchell and Miller had both been clothed with the office of ruling elder. The next family, that of Robert C. Reid's father, James Keid, settled in the same neighborhood in the spring· of 1808. They had been members of the Associate Reformed church in Lexington, Ken– tucky, but left that church because slavery, the giant evil that divided some of the churches that tolerated it so long, was not only tolerated, but Rev. Adam Rankin, their pastor at Lexington, had himself become a slaveholder. Mr. and Mrs. James Reid, though without an opportunity as yet of being admitted into the fellowship of the church, were regular attendants with Messrs. Miller's and Mitchell's families in the prayer-meeting. In the fall of 1808 William .Moreland and his family also settled in the Clark's run neighborhood and joined themselves to the same pray– er-meeting. In the fall of 1809, Rev. Thomas Donnelly and Mr. John Kell, then a licentiate, passed through the neighborhood and preached--,--Mr. Kell in the morning and Rev. Donnelly in the afternoon. This was the first preaching that the embryo congre- 11