KYMONTGO-L Archives

From: "Sharon Karns" <>
Subject: [KYMONTGO-L] McKinney
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 21:26:03 -0800

Handbook of Texas Online: MCKINNEY, COLLIN
















format this article to print
MCKINNEY, COLLIN (1766-1861). Collin McKinney, land
surveyor, merchant, politician, and lay preacher,
was
born on April 17, 1766, in Hunterdon County, New
Jersey,
second of ten children of Daniel and Massie
(Blatchley)
McKinney (many variants of his mother's names occur
in
the sources). Early in the 1770s he migrated with
his
family to Virginia. In these early years the family
was
on the move, and later McKinney helped to provide
for
the family while his father was fighting the British
in
the Revolutionary War. Consequently he had no
opportunity for formal schooling. After the war he
and
his family moved to an outpost established by a
cousin
in 1788 in what later became Lincoln County,
Kentucky.
In 1792 he married Annie (Amy) Moore, with whom he
had
four children. After her death he married Elizabeth
Leek
Coleman, in 1805, and had six children with her.
From
1818 to 1821 McKinney managed the vast Tennessee
estates
of Senator George W. Campbell, who was serving as
minister to Russia. While in Tennessee, McKinney
operated a trading post, but he soon gave it up and
returned to Kentucky, where he settled in Elkton,
Todd
County. Then he migrated with his family and many
McKinney relatives to Hempstead County, Arkansas
Territory, a few miles below Fulton. When this area
became Fayette County, Arkansas, in 1827, he was
elected
justice of the peace.
In 1826 McKinney became a friend of Benjamin R.
Milam,
agent for introducing settlers into Arthur G. Wavell
Red River colony in Northeast Texas, a possession of
Mexico also claimed by the United States as Miller
County, Arkansas. Impressed by the generous land
grants offered to settlers in the Wavell colony and
fully aware that it was in disputed territory,
McKinney
and most of his relatives had by 1830-31 signed
contracts with Milam and located their new surveys.
Until the beginning of the movement for Texas
independence, the McKinney family, like other
settlers,
chafed under the authority of two opposed
governments.
They paid taxes, served on juries, and held county
offices in Miller County, Arkansas, and in the same
year
petitioned the Mexican government at Nacogdoches for
redress of grievances. McKinney was one of five
delegates from Red River to the Convention of 1836
at
Washington-on-the-Brazos. He was one of five
appointed
to the committee to draft the Texas Declaration of
Independence, and as the oldest member of the
convention, at seventy, he was given the pen after
the
signing. He was also a member of the committee that
produced the Constitution of the Republic of
Texas,qv
and later he was elected a delegate from Red River
County to the First, Second, and Fourth congresses
of
the republic. In 1840 he joined other family members
who
earlier had moved to that part of Fannin County
which
became Grayson and Collin counties. Collin County
and
McKinney, the county seat, were named in his honor.
He
is credited with insisting that as new counties were
delineated in North Texas, the boundaries should be
straight.
McKinney was associated with several frontier
churches.
First, he was a deacon in a Separate Baptist church
near
Crab Orchard, Kentucky, where his father moved in
1780.
In 1817 McKinney united with Barton W. Stone's
Christian
movement, and although there is no mention of a
church
where he first lived in Texas, he frequently
exhorted at
religious meetings, and worship was conducted in his
home. The church at Hickman's Prairie was organized
in
1842 with McKinney and his son William C. as elders.
McKinney was also a member of a church at Mantua, a
congregation established by an immigrant preacher,
J. B.
Wilmeth, in 1846. Members of the Church of Christ
consider McKinney a "Christian patriarch." During
his
lifetime he was a subject of six different
governments:
England, Virginia, the United States of America, the
Republic of Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the
Confederate States of America. He died on September
9,
1861, at his home in Collin County and was buried at
Van
Alstyne.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Christian Courier, August 1936. James
K.
Greer, "The Committee on the Texas Declaration of
Independence," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 30,
31
(April, July 1927). Colby D. Hall, Texas Disciples
(Fort
Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1953). Rex
W.
Strickland, Anglo-American Activities in
Northeastern
Texas, 1803-1845 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Texas, 1937).
Lois Garver



top of page | about | search | help | home - contribute -
bookstore - teaching tools - feedback - credits -
multimedia
report an error or correction | suggest an article topic
The Handbook of Texas Online is a joint project of The
General
Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin and the
Texas
State Historical Association.



Copyright © The Texas State Historical Association Last Updated:
December 4, 2002 Comments to:

This thread:

• [KYMONTGO-L] McKinney by "Sharon Karns" <>