Cedarville

In 1804 two families, James Miller's from Scotland and David Mitchel's from Kentucky, settled on Massies Creek and started a praying band, for some years the only members of it. More Scots came. By 1812 they had raised a log church on Miller's farm, twenty-two feet square, the cracks filled with clay. In 1824 they built in stone on the bank of Massies Creek, six miles from Xenia. James Reid came in 1808, William Moreland that same fall, and the praying band became a congregation. Cedarville lay at the center of this Covenanter country, and in time the church would come to it.

What the congregation had was the creek. They built their stone church on the bank of Massies Creek in 1824, six miles out from Xenia, and the village gathered along the same water. Massies Creek is a tributary of the Little Miami, so even here the drainage runs toward the Ohio. The harder country, where the creek cuts down through rock, lies downstream. Up here it is farm water: enough to build beside, enough to settle on, the reason a Scots congregation put its first roof at this particular bend and not another.

The congregation split in 1833, and the Massies Creek roll dropped from a hundred and sixty-five members to a hundred and twenty-seven. Rev. Hugh McMillan came to them out of South Carolina, bringing members with him, and stayed their pastor until he died in 1860. By then the church had moved. In 1853 the old brick meeting house was pulled down and rebuilt in Cedarville, a more central point, and they put into the new walls the stone of the 1824 church and the brick of 1839. The town got the congregation, and the congregation got the town, stones and all.