Millen House

The Millen House (also known as "Raintree House") is a historic residence on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, United States. Built by an early farmer, it is one of Bloomington's oldest houses, and it has been named a historic landmark.

Millen family

Born in 1801 in Chester District, South Carolina, William Moffett Millen married the former Eleanor McGill, a native of Xenia, Ohio, and moved to Bloomington circa 1833. He was one of many Scotch-Irish South Carolinians who moved to the Bloomington region around this time; these individuals fled north because of their opposition to the slavery system prevalent in South Carolina at the time. Most of these people, including Millen, were members of small Presbyterian denominations: the Associate, Associate Reformed, and Reformed Presbyterian Churches. These three denominations were very similar to each other: the Reformed and Associate churches left the Church of Scotland due to what they believed to be that denomination's departure from biblical teachings; and the Associate Reformed Church was formed by a partial merger of the other two denominations in 1782, from which some members of both sides remained separate and reorganized their denominations as they were before the merger. Because of their shared heritage, the members of the three denominations were culturally very similar and maintained social ties across their religious differences. When the Reformed Presbyterian Church's governing body banned slavery in 1800, its members complied with the decision almost unanimously, becoming fervent abolitionists; although the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in the South never spoke officially on the subject, many of its members were in agreement with the Reformed Presbyterians. As the economy of upland South Carolina faltered in the 1820s, many members of these churches began to sell their small farms and move to free states.