D. 4. Matthew Houston (No. 4, p. 233), the fourth child of Matthew Houston and Martha Lyle, married Margaret Cloyd, a sister of Matthew Houston's wife, of Rockbridge Co., Va.
They had two children, viz.:
1. Archibald Houston
2. Romaine Houston
He studied theology and preached as a Presbyterian minister until he was thirty years of age, very animated and quite popular as a pulpit speaker, during the "great revival" in Kentucky and Tennessee in 1808 (vide, p. 26), his sensitive, impulsive nature yielded too far to the extraordinary excitement of the times. He and another Presbyterian minister (Rev. ___ Rankin) connected themselves with that strange sect denominated "Shaking Quakers" (more commonly "Shakers"). He, with his wife and two sons, went and connected themselves with those of persuasion who lived near Lebanon, Ohio, where the writer visited them in 1828-'29. They all received him very kindly, and tried to draw him over to "Shakerism". He was presented on leaving with a book containing an exposition of their sentiments and practice, with the request that I should read it carefully and then write what I thought of it. The sect originated in 1774 in America. Anna Lee, as the head, "The Elect Lady", "the woman spoken of in Revelation xii", had "the gift of tongues", "conversed with the dead, who only understood her tongues." ...
The writer read the book which they gave him and wrote to them that if their sacred volume was inspired at all it was surely not done by the Holy Spirit, "who moved the holy men of old."
I was learned rather recently (1878) that M. Houston abandoned all his errors and returned to the "creed of his fathers."
One of his sons did the same in the twenty-sixth year of his age - then lived for a time in East Tennessee, and afterwards went West, vide Appendix F.
Matthew Houston lived to be a very old man, and was probably the last of the children of his parents who departed this life. The writer is sorry he has been unable to learn anything of the closing period of his life.