“William, James and Morgan Bryan, brothers-in-law of Daniel Boone, who accompanied him from North Carolina to Kentucky, were also natives of Pennsylvania. They were the sons of Morgan Bryan, who came from Ireland prior to 1719, at which date his name appears on the tax list of Birmingham township, Chester County, as a ‘single man.’ He married the following year Martha Strode, and in the year 1734 with fifteen others obtained a grant of a large tract of land on the Opeckon and Potomac rivers near Winchester, Virginia, and removed thereon. From this point he removed with his family to the Yadkin, where Daniel Boone met and married his daughter, Rebecca, in 1755.
“There is an abundance of documentary evidence in Bucks County and in possession of her sons elsewhere, showing that many of the pioneers of Kentucky were natives of Bucks. The wills of many Bucks-countians devise estates to brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, ‘now or late of Virginia,’ or ‘in the county called Kaintuckee, Province of Virginia.’
“Rev. J. W. Wallace, of Independence, Missouri, has in his possession an old account book and diary combined, kept by his great-grandfather, John Wallace, who was born in Warrington, Bucks County, in 1748, and who served with distinction as a lieutenant in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, some of the entries having been made in this book while the owner was in camp with Washington at Valley Forge in the dark winter of 1777-8. Lieutenant John Wallace married into the Finley family and joining them in Loudoun County, removed with them into Kentucky in 1788.
“This remarkable book contains the record of the birth of John Wallace and his eight brothers and sisters, several of whom accompanied him to Kentucky, as well as an account of the journey of the emigrants from Virginia to Kentucky, which was made in wagons from Loudoun County to the Ohio River; from which point a portion of the party went in boats down the Ohio River to Limestone, now Maysville, then overland to Frankfort, while the remainder crossed over the mountains on pack-horses. They had doubtless been preceded by their relative, John Finley, of North Carolina.
“A similar book is in possession of W. W. Flack, of Davenport, Iowa, the great-great-grandson of the first owner. On the fly leaf is endorsed the following: ‘Receipt Book of William Flack, May 20, 1789.’ This William Flack was born in Buckingham township, Bucks County, on May eleventh, 1746, and died at Crab Orchard, Lincoln County, Kentucky, in 1824. He was a son of James and Ann (Baxter) Flack, Scotch-Irish emigrants who came to Bucks County about 1730 and settled near Bushington. William Flack was captain of the Buckingham company of militia during the Revolution, and is said to have been in active service at the battle of Brandywine and at other points. After the close of the war, accompanied by his brother Benjamin and a nephew of the same name, he removed to Kentucky, by way of Virginia.
“One of the memoranda in the old book is as follows: ‘Benjamin Flack was killed by the Indians at the Mouth of Salt River the 1st Day of March 1786.’ William Flack married Susannah Callison in Kentucky, March twenty-first, 1797, and the ‘Receipt Book’ records that event and the births of their six children, two of whom died in infancy. On hearing of the death of his father, which occurred September second, 1802, Captain Flack started for Bucks County, and it is related that his long absence on this tedious journey led his family to believe that he had been captured by the Indians.
“While these Pennsylvanians were wending their way southward, their brethren in the Cumberland and Juniata valleys, augmented by recruits from settlements farther east, were pushing their way westward into Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland counties, whence they migrated to Kentucky and the Northwest Territory.”[[7]]
As to that war-like breed, the Scotch-Irish, famous in American frontiering, the same historian first quoted goes on in detailed description from which we may take the following:
“History has touched lightly upon the home life of the little colony of Ulster Scots, who settled on the banks of the Neshaminy in the townships of Warwick, Warrington and New Britain, in Bucks County, Pa.; but these people were none the less worthy of a prominent place in the records of the past. Driven by religious persecution from their native Highlands in the seventeenth century, the remnants of many a noble clan sought temporary refuge in the province of Ulster, Ireland, whence, between the years 1720 and 1740, thousands of them migrated to America, and peopled the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania’s frontier with a sturdy, rugged race that was destined to play an important part in the formation of our national character.
“Clannish by nature and tradition, they clung together in small communities of two score or more families, a majority of them related by ties of blood or marriage. They took up the unsettled portions of the new province. Accustomed for generations to the rugged mountain sides of their own native land, the roughness of the new territory did not discourage them. In fact, the steep hillsides on the banks of our rivers and smaller streams, shunned or neglected by the early English settlers, seem to have had an especial attraction for them.