He was a neighbor and friend of Wm.

Wilkins, afterwards Judge, Secretary of War, and Minister to Russia, and had named his son for him.

When his prediction was fulfilled and the road made, it ran through his land, and on it he laid out the village and called it Wilkinsburg.

Mr.McNair lived south of it in a rough stone house--the manor of the neighborhood--with half a dozen slave huts ranged before the kitchen door, and the gateway between his grounds and the village, as seen from the upper windows of our house, was, to me, the boundary between the known and the unknown, the dread portal through which came Adam, the poor old ragged slave, with whom my nurse threatened me when I did not do as she wished.

He was a wretched creature, who made and sold hickory brooms, as he dragged his rheumatic limbs on the down grade of life, until he found rest by freezing to death in the woods, where he had gone for saplings.
I was born on the 6th of December, 1815, in Pittsburg, on the bank of the Monongahela, near its confluence with the Allegheny.