JOHN NEWTON COLLARD, third of the children of the second Joseph of the Black Hawk War, was born March 23, 1817.
His birth occurred about the time of the family migration from the "State of Kaintuck" to Missouri Territory.
Illinois was also still a territory when he was born. Whether he was born in Kentucky or in Missouri Territory
is not certain. His parents, Joseph Collard II and Mary Null, were married in Kentucky and their first two children,
Joseph III and Mary, were born in Christian county in that state. Joseph was born in 1815 and Mary in 1816. It
is supposed they died young, as there is no further family record of them. Even their birth dates are missing from
the family Bible record possessed by Nathan Jay Collard of Vandalia, Missouri, a descendant of Black Hawk War Joseph.
There exists however another partial record, that of the marriage of Joseph Collard and Mary Null in 1814 and of
the births of three children in the succeeding years, 1815, 1816 and 1817, the last birth being that of John Newton
Collard, long a log cabin resident on the road between Pleasant Hill and Nebo.
In the early days of the Bay Creek country, southeast of the village of Fairfield (now Pleasant Hill), dwelt two
John Collards, residing a mile apart. They were John J. Collard, former county clerk of Pike county whose history
has been reviewed, and John N. Collard of this review. They were first cousins, sons of John and Joseph Collard,
brothers, and grandsons of Joseph Collard of the Revolution.
The two John Collards of the Bay Creek region were nearly of an age, both born in the year 1817, one on September
7, the other (John N.) on the preceding March 23. Both were active in the early life of the Bay Creek settlement.
John J., the noted Pike county clerk, was light complected, with reddish hair and fair features, characteristics
of most of the Collard family with the exception of descendants of the second Joseph. John N. Collard was dark,
with black hair. The early settlers distinguished them by naming one "Black John," the other "Red
John." Throughout the early period these terms sufficient to identify the Collard cousins of Bay Creek.
Receipts filed among estate records in the archives of Lincoln county, Missouri, indicate that John N. Collard,
when a boy in Missouri, was tutored, for several months at least, along with descendants of the noted Warner Hall
Lewises and Virginia Meriwethers, whose intriguing history has been related in foregoing chapters. It appears in
fact that John N. received some tutoring in the Missouri home of Nicholas F. Lewis, descendant of the Warner Hall
line and a first cousin of Samuel Lewis of early Pleasant Hill.
This circumstances also lends color to the belief of some of the Lewis-Collard descendants that there was an intermarriage
of the families of Lewis and Collard shortly after the Revolution and that the wife of Joseph Collard I of the
Revolution, of whom there is no certain record, was a descendant of that Pioneer Irish John Lewis who in 1720 killed
his Irish landlord in defense of his home, and fled to America, becoming the first settler of what is now Augusta
county, Virginia.
It is believed that the first Joseph Collard's wife (ancestress of all the Pike county Collards) may have been
that Margaret Lewis (called Peggy) whose first husband, Captain McClenahan, fell in fierce hand-to-hand fighting
with the Indians at the Battle of the Point, in 1774. There is no record that Captain McClanahan's widow later
married a man named Collard. This Margaret Lewis was a daughter of Thomas Lewis, who was a son of Irish John. Margaret's
sister, Agatha, also lost her husband in the same desperate encounter at the Point, described in detail in an earlier
chapter.
Suggesting also that the ancestress of the Collard family of Pike county was this Margaret Lewis is the fact that
Joseph Collard named his first daughter Margaret (who also was called Peggy) and that John N. Collard of this review,
grandson of the senior Joseph, named one of his sons Thomas Lewis Collard, this latter Collard having married Lucinda
Moyers of the Nebo neighborhood.
Joseph Collard II and Nicholas F. Lewis resided in the same neighborhood in Lincoln county, Missouri, and children
of one family and grandchildren of the other were schooled together. Nicholas F. Lewis, a pioneer of Lincoln county,
was a son of John Lewis, third child of the second (in America) Zachary Lewis and his wife, Mary Waller. The mother
of Nicholas was Ann Lewis, daughter of Colonel Robert of Belvoir (of the Warner Hall Lewises) and his wife, Jane
Meriwether, and sister Millie Lewis, mother of the Pleasant Hill pioneer.
Nicholas F. Lewis married Ann Meriwether, and their children, as named in Nicholas Lewis's will on file in the
court house at Troy, Missouri, included Thomas Walker, Susan, Laurie, Ann Eliza, James H. and Lydia S. Lewis. Ann
Meriwether, the mother, was a sister of Elizabeth Meriwether who married Thomas Walker Lewis, first child of that
Nicholas Lewis who was the second son of Colonel Robert and Jane (Meriwether) Lewis, and whose wife was Mary Walker,
daughter of Dr. Thomas Walker and his wife, Mildred Thornton.
Nicholas F. Lewis, shortly before his death in 1840 in Lincoln county, Missouri, make a will wherein he named James
Clark of Lincoln county and Walker G. Meriwether of Pike county, Missouri, as members of a group to represent his
estate. James Clark (whose kinsmen are later found intermarrying with the Pike county Collard descendants) and
Walker G. Meriwether were the husbands of Jane Warner Lewis and Margaret Douglas Lewis, the two daughters of Thomas
Walker and Elizabeth (Meriwether) Lewis.
Thus we see how inextricably interwoven is the Collard family history with the life histories of some of America's
most celebrated pioneer families, among them the Warner Hall Lewises and the Meriwethers, from whom came Captain
Meriwether Lewis, friend of Thomas Jefferson, noted northwestern explorer and hero of the famed Lewis and Clark
expedition (1804-06).
John N. Collard was 15 years old when the family emigrated from Lincoln county, Missouri, to Pike county, Illinois,
in the spring of 1832. He became the family's main support when his father, Joseph Collard II, enlisted at Atlas
for the Black Hawk War in April of that year, about a month after the family's settlement in the Bay Creek country.
The father was killed not long after the close of the war.
In Pike county, on March 7, 1841, John N. Collard married Rachel D. Turnbaugh, a daughter of Steele and Christena
Turnbaugh, pioneers of the Pleasant Hill country. The wedding ceremony was said by the bride's uncle, the Reverend
Joseph Turnbaugh, another of the South Pike pioneers.
Rachel Turnbaugh was a first cousin of Jacob Turnbaugh, who in 1837 had married John N. Collard's younger sister,
Abigail H. Collard, whom he took to his newly-raised log abode in Fairfield (modern Pleasant Hill), Mr. Turnbaugh's
log house being one of the first half-dozen erected where now is Pleasant Hill. The pioneer town of Fairfield,
founded in June, 1836, was only about a year old when Jacob Turnbaugh built his log home where he took his bride,
Abigail, whom he married July 2, 1837. Rachel Turnbaugh also was a kinswoman of Christena Turnbaugh (daughter of
Levi and Keziah Turnbaugh of the early Pleasant Hill settlement) who in 1852 married William C. Brant, brother
of John Hancock Brant, who married John J. Collard's daughter, Mary Elizabeth, who was the mother of Mrs. O. E.
Gresham and Mrs. J. C. Yokem of Pleasant Hill and Alvin T. Brant of Pittsfield. Christena's father, Levi Turnbaugh,
died in the Bay Creek country September 14, 1834; Christena was then an infant, being born in a log cabin on Bay
Creek, May 5, 1833. Her mother, Keziah Turnbaugh, later married Jacob Williamson.
Rachel Turnbaugh, first wife of John N. Collard, was born nine months and a day after Illinois Territory became
a state, her birth occurring September 4, 1819, the same year in which her sister-in-law, Abigail (Collard) Turnbaugh,
was born. She and Abigail grew up together in the then new state of Missouri, erected out of the Louisiana Purchase.
John N. and Rachel (Turnbaugh) Collard set up housekeeping on the Pleasant Hill-Nebo road in the southwest of the
northeast quarter of Section 23, Pleasant Hill township. Here John N. erected a round log cabin which stood for
many years and in which his children were born. Here, too, he took his second wife, Mary Ann Moore, whom he married
following the death of his first wife in 1832, and here the children of the second family were born.
John N. Collard's first round log house was torn down in 1870 and a hewed log house, 16 by 18 feet, built upon
the site. This second log house still stands atop a high bank at a bend in the Nebo-Pleasant Hill road, about half
way between the two towns. It is one of the few log houses in the county that is still inhabited. Joseph William
Collard, a son of John N. Collard by his second marriage, is the present owner and tenant of the 20-acre tract
which has so long been in the Collard name. The road from Nebo to Pleasant Hill cuts through the tract, the house
being on the south side of the road.
Joe Collard, born January 30, 1857 and now nearing his 83rd birthday, ‘keeps batch" in the old log house that
was built by his father 69 years ago. The house is now in a dilapidated condition, with a frame lean-to at the
rear of the log structure in a state of near collapse, but it still stands as a relic of pioneer architecture.
The present tenant of the house was born in the round log cabin that preceded it. Nathan J. Collard of Vandalia,
Missouri, a younger brother of Joe, recalls that he was six months old when the present cabin was built. He was
born February 19, 1870.