This pertains to mailings from Elizabeth Carr McKay dated 02/01/2005 and 02/02/2005 in which she asks whether I am acquainted with a cemetery NW of Peoria where members of the Mendenhall, Cox, Clayton, Thornburgh, and Taylor families are buried, who were apparently Quakers who emigrated from Surry County, NC, spending several years in Kentucky and Indiana before arriving in the vicinity of Dunlap in Radnor Township in NW Peoria County and establishing several communities there. This seems to have been the Dickinson (Dickerson) Historical Cemetery. There are Mendenhalls buried in nearby cemeteries as well. I am not well acquainted with that territory, only occasionally passing through Peoria on the way to Indiana and points east. In exploring Peoria County on the internet, I cannot find references to this particular cemetery and can find no mention of early Mendenhall settlers before the Civil War. I would suspect that people with these names, coming from Surry County, NC, through Kentucky and Indiana, might have lost their Quaker identity in Kentucky, where there seemed to be few Friends settlements. I can find no records of Friends Meetings in Peoria County, IL. There was a large settlement of Friends in Vermilion County, IL near the Indiana/Illinois border. These were Friends who had generally followed the migratory trail from the Carolinas and Georgia up to southeastern Ohio, and then across Indiana. These Friends were members of Indiana Yearly Meeting (Orthodox) until Western Yearly Meeting was set off from Indiana Yearly Meeting ca. 1862.----- The Benjaminville Friends Meeting near Bloomington, Illinois was affiliated with Illinois Yearly Meeting (Friends General Conference). These Hicksite Friends, according to my understanding, did not arrive in Illinois until the decade of the 1850's and tended to come from northern Virginia and from Ohio. ----- Herbert Standing.