(This was also on the same page of the scrapbook that the article about the 1872 picnic was on which is what the italicized comment is referring to. It is a brief comment on the picnic of 1869. One interesting note is the date of this article which is the first Saturday rather than the second Saturday which became the established date for the Collett-McKay Picnic.)

* * * Update * * * I now have the entire Newspaper write-up for this year. The missing parts are supplemented from a book titled 'New Burlington: The Life and Death of an American Village' pages 203 & 205.

A notable event, differing from ordinary public assemblages, occurred on the seventh of August when the entire kith and kin of two celebrated families of Ohio, to wit: Collett and McKay, joined in the pleasantest manner possible, to entertain one another agreeably to their own notions of social enjoyment and propriety.

Why there have not been more of these social family reunions, after the toil of harvest is over, is one of those questions too subtle for analysis. An hour thus spent in perfect peace of mind and in easy, rollicking conversation, flowing in fluent sympathy with all the aims, hopes, surprises and pleasures of life, away from the vulgar eye of the world, is worth a great deal in forming just opinions of the worth of social intercourse.

The manhood of the Collett and McKay families is to be measured only by the expressive word 'big.' Any other adjective would but poorly convey an adequate idea of the size of the men. Seven generations of sturdy farmers have gone before, and for them to lean upon: and there is no taint of weakness observable in their composition. Independence, courage, administrative talent, tact, and a likely taste for books, are the solid characteristics that distinguish them as a community of people.

More than two hundred years ago, husband, wife and babe, set sail from the coast of France to find a home in America. The wife, after a few day's passage, died and a famine having broken out on ship board, an allowance of one biscuit each day was issued to the adults on board. The children were doomed to starve. On this scant pittance the father and child survived and after a long voyage, reached their destination.

From the motherless babe, subsisted on half a biscuit and cradled in the arms of the sea, the hardy, loyal race of Colletts sprang. The sons and daughters are worthy to be the descendants of such a grand sire, as he, who in the midst of death, famine and storm, saved to the uttermost, the vine which has nourished a thousand branches.

There were present on the picnic grounds forty-one clusters from the original tree, numbering in all one hundred and eighty-five souls, all bearing the name of either Collett or McKay. Besides these, there were also present, those who descended directly from the parent stock but who, in consequence of marriage, have dropped one or the other of the pair of names.

(It's possible that there were parts of the original news write-up that were omitted from the New Burlington book. The paragraph below is obviously a partial as the last sentence about real estate is the only one that appears in the book.)

Mrs. Noah Haines of Harveysburg, and Mrs. Catharine Allen of Waynesville, and others who's names I did not learn. The real estate owned by these two families alluded to above, amounts in the aggregate to three-quarters of a million dollars and comprises six thousand acres of cultivated lands.

I undertook to count the actual number of babies present, but owing to the omnipresent ruffles and cloaks of similar style, color and fabric, and the ubiquity of movement by which they were transported from one pair of arms to another, occasioned me so much fatal reckoning as to cause an abandonment of the enterprise.

We, four of us, took our departure just as the eclipse grew thickest, the dusty road flying under our horses' feet with the music of the stones and the spheres under us, and the wind whipping our coat tails into very whip-crackers; but, ballasted with plenty of cake in the bottom of the vehicle, I rode home to find that I did not own the pretty word 'big' in my possession. J.B.C. Harveysburg, August 7, 1869.

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