From St. Clair county—Risdon Moore, Benjamin Watts, Jacob Ogle, Joshua Oglesby, William Scott, Sr., William Biggs, Geo. Blair, Charles R. Matheny, James Garretson, and [34]William Kinney.
From Madison County—Wm. B. Whiteside.
From Monroe County—James Lemen, Sr.
From Washington—Wm. H. Bradsby.
V. RECOLLECTIONS OF A CENTENNARIAN
By Dr. Williamson F. Boyakin, Blue Rapids, Kansas (1807-1907)
(The Standard, Chicago, November 9, 1907.)
The Lemen family was of Irish [Scotch] descent. They were friends and associates of Thomas Jefferson. It was through his influence that they migrated West. When the Lemen family arrived at what they designated as New Design, in the vicinity of the present town of Waterloo, in Monroe county, twenty-five miles southeast of the city of St. Louis, Illinois was a portion of the state of Virginia. [Ceded to U. S. two years previous.]
Thomas Jefferson gave them a kind of carte blanche for all the then unoccupied territory of Virginia, and gave them $30 in gold to be paid to the man who should build the first meeting house on the western frontier.[32] This rudely-constructed house of worship was built on a little creek named Canteen [Quentin], just a mile or two south of what is now called Collinsville, Madison county, Illinois.
In the mountains of Virginia there lived a Baptist minister by the name of Torrence. This Torrence, at an Association in Virginia, introduced a resolution against slavery. In a speech in favor of the resolution he said, "All friends of humanity should support the resolution." The elder James Lemen being present voted for it and adopted it for his motto, inscribed it on a rude flag, and planted it on the rudely-constructed flatboat on which the family floated down the Ohio river, in the summer of 1790 [1786], to the New Design location.[33]
The distinguishing characteristic of the churches and associations that subsequently grew up in Illinois [under the Lemen influence] was the name "The Baptized Church of Christ, Friends to Humanity."