This is a transcription of the inroduction section from The Men Who Called Dr. Bullions 104 Years Ago, written by Rev. John C. Scott, D. D., The Washington County Post, Cambridge, NY, 1911.
Two years ago a box, 16X11X6 inches, containing papers dating from 1792 to 1852, which had accumulated in the hands of the clerks of the old Associate Presbytery of Cambridge, came into my hands for examination. Among these papers was the original copy of the call made to Mr. Alexander Bullions, Minister of the Gospel,” from the Associate congregation of Cambridge (now the Coila church) bearing the date of June 18, 1807, and with it several petitions relative to the call or to other church matters of that day. There are ninety-eight signatures to this call, men only being permitted to sign such instruments at that time, and ten more sign the petition for the call; in addition there are fourteen signatures to contemporary petitions, and the signatures to the call are attested by Rev. Arch. Whyte, a home missionary minister, long a resident in the town of Argyle (born 1755, died 1849), who presided on that occasion. Many of these men were pioneers in this region, for it was then scarcely more than forty years since the first settlements had been made. One reads these signatures almost with reverence when he remembers that the hands that cleared up and made habitable “the forest primeval” which once stood where we now live.
They were a closely related group of men, for church associations were much closed than now. Family relationships and acquaintance had largely influenced settlement here, and their children generally married within the church. They were men of faith and lovers of civil and religious liberty, for which they had suffered much. The older men had lied through the Revolutionary war, and some of them had served in the ranks. They were patriots almost to a man, though but recent emigrants from the mother country. Some of these men are still remembered by our older people, and many characteristic and illuminative incidents of their time yet linger in memory — incidents grave and gay, amusing, pathetic, and even tragic. The material is here for a book no less interesting that “Old Mortality” or “The Scarlet Letter,” if only the chronicler were here to write it. The age in which they lived, with its homespun and log cabins, is strangely remote. We can scarcely understand the conditions of life then, and yet many of the houses they builded are still standing and occupied.
The family history, or genealogy, of these men is an interesting study. Families were then generally large, and some of them have expended into great and widely scattered family groups; others have shrunk up and faded away altogether, or are known only through female descendants. A surprisingly large number of them have descendants living among us, some of the fifth and sixth generations; the descendants of others are scattered from ocean to ocean. Three of them have daughters yet living; George Lourie, father of Miss Ann Maria Lourie, late of Coila, now of Greenwich; David Edie, father of Mrs. Ellen Christie Edie; and Benjamin French, father of Mrs. Charlotte Shear of Putnam. The time of emigration west was then already rising, and within a dozen years a considerable colony from this community had been established at what is Reynoldsburgh, Franklin county, Ohio, a few miles east of the state capital, where the names Coller, Cowden, Crawford, French, Frazier, Graham, Livingston, Maxwell, Strang and others once familiar here are still well known. Other colonies were later located in the western part of our state and in other states farther west.
No detailed history of these men can be undertaken here, though the temptation to do so in many cases is great. A few facts only are set down, and I have indicated their relationship to some living descendants wherever these are known. I have also usually given their ages when this call was signed, that the reader may the better be able to picture himself this company of men gathered, dressed in short breeches, top boots and shoe-buckles, with cocked hats and broad brims, and perhaps in powder and queues, in “the old yellow meeting house” on that June day 104 years ago to start Dr. Bullions on what proved to be his life work.
The call itself is in the form still in use in the United Presbyterian church, and the names appended to it are as follows, spelled as they usually spelled them, and in the order in which they were signed: