Miami County, Ohio Genealogical Researchers -- Sponsored by the Computerized Heritage Association


    MRS. LUCINDA (McMILLAN) LEWIS

    Mrs. Lucinda (McMillan) Lewis is the daughter of George and Rebecca (McKey) McMillan. She was born in this county, August 5, 1825. She is of Scotch-Irish descent, is proud of her ancestry and has reason to be, and in this sketch the writer will recapitulate to some extent the genealogy of the family.

    Mrs. Lewis' grandparents, George and Mary (Crain) McMillan, emigrated to America from the north of Ireland before the Revolutionary war, and first settled in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, and afterward moved to Perry county of the same state, where he purchased a farm. By occupation he was a farmer and weaver, and evidently at the time of his emigration was a man of some wealth , for he purchased his land of the "Logans" in Perry county, Pennsylvania, and paid for it four hundred and ninety pounds English sterling. He and his family were strict Presbyterians, and held family worship three times every day. In his family were eight children, four sons and four daughters. The eldest, Eleanor, married Hugh Milligan, and moved to Greenfield, Ohio. Jane married George Black, and remained in Perry county, Pennsylvania. Susan married William Irvine, and also remained in Perry County, Pennsylvania. Mary, the youngest daughter, married Holbert Murray, in 1773. They moved to Miami county, Ohio, and settled near Troy, October 1, 1814. William and Thomas McMillan moved to Greenfield, Ohio. James stayed on the homestead, and there is now standing on the old farm the log cabin first built by George McMillan, Sr., preserved and cared for by his descendants, for the farm is still in the family. The old cabin shows the bullet holes that were made by the red men during the Indian war, when Pennsylvania was a colony, George McMillan, the fourth son and the father of our subject, emigrated from Perry county, Pennsylvania, to Miami county Ohio, in 1807, and purchased one hundred and sixty acres of land near Troy, which land had within its boundaries what is now the Miami county fair grounds.

    George McMillan, the grandfather of Mrs. Lewis, entered the Revolutionary army, was quartermaster, and before the war closed ranked as colonel in the Continental army. George McMillan, the son and father of Mrs. Lewis, was a soldier in the war of 1812. After the war he returned to his farm, and on the first day of September, 1816, was married in Troy to Rebecca McKey, whose parents came to Troy from Wheeling, Virginia.

    George and Rebecca McMillan had six children, two sons and four daughters: Marshal A. was born September 5, 1718; Silas Preston was born October 17, 1819; Eliza Jane was born July 4, 1822; Lucinda had a twin sister, Angelinda, and they were born August 5, 1825; Eusebia, the youngest child, was born September 29, 1834.

    On the farm he purchased in 1807 George McMillan died in 1840. Rebecca, his wife, died in Troy in 1850. The following is a brief record of their children. Marshall A. died August 3, 1839, age nineteen years. Angelinda died February 27, 1844, aged eighteen years. Eusebia died at the tender age of nine years. Silas Preston McMillan was married to Mary E. Barrett, June 24, 1841, and to this marriage were born nine children. He raised Company I, Sixty-first Ohio Volunteer Infantry, April 9, 1861, of which company he was appointed captain, and was discharged by reason of disability September 3, 1862. His son, Blair McMillan, enlisted in Company I, Sixty-first Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He was promoted to corporal April 23, 1862, was discharged from the hospital at Washington, D. C., and came home, not expected to live, but recovered, re-enlisted and remained in the army during the war, participating in thirteen battles. He was only fifteen years old when he first enlisted. Captain Silas P. McMillan died in Callao, Missouri, March 16, 1876, and was buried in Rose Hill cemetery, of Troy, Ohio. Eliza Jane McMillan was married to James McKaig, of Troy, Ohio, in November, 1844. There were four children born to this union, three sons and one daughter. The two eldest sons died in infancy, and the daughter, Jennie R. McKaig, died April 17, 1872, at the age of twenty-two. She was a bright, promising, intelligent young lady, the pride and hope of her parents, a graduate of the Troy high school and of Oxford College. George McKaig, the youngest son, is living near Troy and is noted in this county as an importer and breeder of fine horses. His mother, Eliza J. McKaig, died at her home in Troy, in 1886, and his father James McKaig, died May 26, 1894. They were well known citizens of this county. The home farm of one hundred and sixty acres, on which he settled, is now in the corporation limits of Troy. He also acquired several fine farms in this county, and was known for his thrift, industry and business ability.

    Lucinda (McMillan) Lewis, the subject of this sketch, is the only member of her father's family now living. She was married to Albert Lewis, of Cincinnati, by Rev. Henry Calhoun, March 10, 1868. She resided in Cincinnati three years, and then returned to Troy, where she now lives a widow. Mrs. Lewis is in many respects a remarkable woman. She has inherited from her ancestors the spirit of intense devotion to the right, and an equally intense hatred of the wrong, and her devotion to the faith of the Presbyterian church is a legacy of her ancestors. She has the faith and firmness of the old covenanters and is inflexible in following, to the letter, the tenets of her church. In 1874, when the banner of the crusade was raised by the ladies of Troy against the saloons of Troy, she was a brave and energetic worker in that devoted band of women, who sought by prayers and song and by woman's earnest pleading and woman's tears, to arrest, and, if possible, to crush out the sin of intemperance in Ohio. Time and again she led the band into the saloons, or, if refused entrance, knelt in prayer on the sidewalk in front of the places where liquor was sold, undismayed by threats and curses, relying alone on the power of prayer, and the eloquent pleadings of mothers, wives and daughters, that the sin-cursed traffic might be abated, and homes made free from the awful shame of intemperance. She also worked with the crusade band in Cincinnati, and her name is mentioned in "Mother" Stewart's history of the Crusades of Ohio, as one of the efficient and fearless workers. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union was the outgrowth of the crusade movement, which has been and is now one of the strongest influences against the liquor traffic in the United States. She was, and is now, a prominent worker of that order. In the Temperance Fair, held in Cincinnati, in 1875, and now historic in temperance work, she had charge of the table of fancy work and realized from her table one hundred and thirty-five dollars and eighty cents.

    The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, in 1876, held a national convention and also a fair in Philadelphia. The convention was composed of three delegates from each state. Mrs. Lewis was selected is one of the delegates from Ohio, and attended the convention. She has served the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, of Troy, as secretary and president, and she is now president of the society. She has been elected and served repeatedly as a delegate to, county, district and state conventions of the organization. She was sent as a delegate from Ohio to the national convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union held at St. Louis, in 1896. She is now, and has been for many years, superintendent of jail and infirmary work in this county. Meetings are held each week in the year at the county jail and also at the county infirmary. Mrs. Lewis is active in all church, temperance and benevolent work in Troy. Her ambition in life is to work for the cause of Christianity and do what she can, for the upbuilding of a higher, purer and nobler manhood and womanhood. She is respected and honored by her church and the community in which she lives as an earnest Christian, and a noble useful woman. E.S.W.

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