DANIEL D. COLLARD was the eighth in the family of eleven children born to former Pike County Clerk John J. Collard
and Mary Elizabeth Barton. He was born in Pleasant Hill August 29, 1857, shortly after the removal of the family
from Pittsfield, where John J. had twice served Pike county as its clerk.
John J. Collard named several of his sons for leading Pike countians of the day. So we find him naming this one
for Daniel D. Hicks, who was contemporary with John J. Collard as a teacher in the early Pike county schools and
who held the office of sheriff of Pike county in the period 1846-50, when Collard was serving as county clerk.
Hicks succeeded Sheriff Ephraim Cannon, under whom he had served as deputy sheriff from 1842 to 1846. Following
his term as sheriff he engaged in merchandising in Pittsfield. In 1865 he entered the First National Bank of Pittsfield
as clerk and teller and in 1867 was elected its cashier, in which capacity he served up to the time of his death,
when he was succeeded by his son, Robert Truman Hicks.
Sheriff Hicks, so esteemed by John J. Collard that he named a son for him, was a stalwart of early Pike county
days. He was a Vermonter, born at Sunderland, Vermont, August 12, 1812. He came of a line of warrior. His father,
Truman B. Hicks, was a soldier of the War of 1812. His grandfather, Simeon Hicks, espoused the cause of the colonies
in the Revolution. Daniel D. came to Pike county from New York state in 1838. Arriving here he sought a school
and began teaching in the pioneer schools of the county when Lyman Scott was school commissioner. Later, under
the school commissioner in 1841, he met and became associated with the self-made scholar, John J. Collard, with
whom he formed a lasting friendship.
The late William A. Goodin once related story of those pioneer teachers, Collard and Hicks. Collard introduced
his friend, Dan Hicks, to the members of a county school board. “Is he a fighter?” inquired the school board of
Collard. “I’ll wager he can lick his weight in wildcats,” replied Collard. The school board was skeptical. Hicks
didn’t look the part. It was a day when it took brawn as well as brain to teach school.
The school board debated. While they were debating a man passed by in a wagon. The board halted him, asked him
to alight. “Tell you what we’ll do,” said the school board to Hicks. “If you can out-wrestle that man, you get
the job.” “I will do my best,” said Hicks.
They went at it. It was nip and tuck. Hicks put up a magnificent fight. It took his burly opponent a long time
to throw him. He finally did get the best of Hicks. But the school board was impressed. Hicks had shown plenty
of grit. The school board told him the job was his. They told him also that the man with whom he had wrestled was
the champion wrestler of the county. The episode not only made Hicks a teacher. It made him a deputy sheriff and
sheriff. The story of the wrestling match was long recounted among the people of Pike county.
Colonel Hicks, in October, 1842, married Mary J. Burbridge, a native of Ohio and a daughter of Elder James Burbridge,
so well-known in Pike county’s early days. She died March 30, 1844, and an only child, Helen M., died at 18. Colonel
Hicks afterward married Julia Ann Burbridge, a daughter of Robert Burbridge, and a cousin of his first wife. They
were married in 1845 and had seven children, namely: Frances, who married George Barber; Barbara E., who married
Henry R. Mills; Florence E., who married Erwin P. Dow; Emma, who married Judge Harry Higbee; Robert Truman, who
became cashier of the First National Bank of Pittsfield; Laura, who married Martin S. Frick of Independence, Missouri;
and James Wes Hicks.
It is probable that Daniel D. Collard may have been named also, indirectly, for that Dan Collard of the early Missouri
border, who was a brother of Joseph Collard, the grandfather of John J. Collard. Joseph and his brother Dan and
his sister Mary, who was the wife of William Banks whom she married in Virginia in 1754, came to the Missouri border
about 1804 or 1805. There Dan Collard and his brother-in-law settled in the Daniel Boone neighborhood, near present
Marthasville, on the trial that led from Boone's settlement to Fort Zumwalt, near present O'Fallon, Missouri.
This Dan Collard was a trapper and furrier. He sold his furs in the town of St. Louis, as did Daniel Boone. He
is said to have been killed by border pirates while enroute to St. Louis with an ox-wagon load of furs in 1816.
The place of his burial is unknown, as is also the record of his family, if he had one. There is no record of his
marriage.
Daniel D. Collard was twice married. His first wife was Fannie Craig of Chicago. They had four children, Arthur,
Parley, Ora Emma and Lillian Collard.
Arthur Collard, the first born, is among the missing, his address unknown.
Parley Collard died of appendicitis at the age of nine at Blue Springs, Missouri.
Ora Emma Collard, who was named for her aunt, Ora Emma (Collard) Hughes, married John Tyler Waugh. He died at Pleasant
Hill April 5, 1935 and is buried in Crescent Heights cemetery at Pleasant Hill.
Lillian Collard married Frank Cummins and they reside at Blue Springs, Missouri.
Daniel D. Collard's second wife was Mrs. Delilah Carpenter of Higginsville, Missouri. She had a daughter, Ella
Carpenter, who married Arch Williams. She lives at Lexington, Missouri. Her husband is deceased.
Ora Emma Waugh, daughter of Daniel D. Collard, made her home for a long time with her father's sister, Mrs. Martin
H. (Eliza Jane Collard) Hulshult, in Pleasant Hill. Mrs. Hulshult at her death left her home in Pleasant Hill to
her niece, Ora Emma.
Mrs. Waugh teaches in a grade school at Independence, Missouri. She, too, is a member of the teaching dynasty established
by her grandfather, John J. Collard. She formerly taught school in Pike county. Her first school was at Fruit Ridge.
She taught also at Bayville and Martinsburg in Pike county. She was latest in a line of Collard teachers at Bayville,
which included her grandfather, John J. Collard, her uncle, John Ray Collard, and her aunt, Eliza Jane, and Mary
Elizabeth Collard.
Daniel D. Collard died at Lexington, Missouri, on March 16, 1905.
William Webb Collard, ninth of John J. Collard's children, was born at Pleasant Hill July 27, 1859. Collard descendants
believe that this child died in infancy, as the family record contains no further mention of him and leaves his
death date blank.
Ora Emma Collard, tenth of the Collard children, was born in Pleasant Hill August 17, 1861. She was the latest
survivor of the family of eleven children, her death occurring at Blue Springs, Missouri, May 31, 1938.
Ora Emma Collard attended Pittsfield high school when she was a girl, during which time she lived with her cousin
by marriage, Mrs. Ellen J. Doss, wife of Dr. Charles H. Doss. Mrs. Doss was the former wife of William Riley Wilson,
a son of David Wilson and Isaphena Collard, the latter an elder sister of John J. Collard. Riley Wilson was circuit
clerk of Pike county from 1880 to 1884. He died in Chicago April 3, 1893.
Mrs. Doss before her first marriage was Ellen J. Fry, a daughter of Harrison and Matilda Fry of Pike county, Missouri.
She married Riley Wilson May 13, 1870. She married Dr. C. H. Doss in 1896, following the death in January, 1895,
of his first wife, who was Margaret Thresher, a daughter of J. M. Thresher of Morgan county, Illinois, by whom
he had 11 children.
Ora Emma Collard married George E. Hughes August 27, 1881 and they went to Blue Springs, Missouri, where she dies
in 1938 and where he still resides. They had two children, Lester H. and Clara. Lieutenant Lester H. Hughes died
at Atlanta, Georgia, in 1917, while serving in the United States Army in the World War. Mrs. Clara Hughes Jones
lives in Anaheim, California. She has two children, Priscilla Ann and Lester George.
Ora Emma united with the Methodist church in Pleasant Hill from which she transferred her membership to the old
Blue Springs Methodist church in Missouri. Last of the John J. Collard children, she died at Blue Springs May 31,
1938, after a long illness and is buried in the cemetery at Blue Springs.
Last born of the John J. Collard children was Laura Ann Collard. She was born at Pleasant Hill October 5, 1866,
and died October 22 the same year.
Mary Elizabeth Barton Collard, wife of John J., died at Pleasant Hill January 18, 1867, only a few months after
the birth and death of her last child. John J. Collard died March 22, 1874. He and his wife are buried in the now
long- abandoned Jackie Sapp cemetery surmounting the Mississippi river bluff on the present Elza Barton place on
the bluff road between Pleasant Hill and Stockland. The grave of John J. Collard was one of the latest graves made
in that old cemetery, which was abandoned later in 1874 with the opening of the new cemetery adjacent to Pleasant
Hill, now known as Crescent Heights.
Not a stone stands intact in the old Sapp cemetery, where sleep so many of those pioneers who have trodden the
stage of our story. Broken and dismantled slabs strew the summit on the bluffs for a considerable distance. From
this high burial ridge may be viewed one of the grandest of Pike county's scenic panoramas, the far reaches of
the great Mississippi valley and the misty hills of Missouri, whence came, in pioneer days, many a perished form
that is lying here.
Here in this old cemetery, where many of the Collard line found a last resting place, may still be read inscriptions
on fallen stones that tell a graphic story of the early community of the plagues that visited the settlement, of
the lack of medical help, of young mothers who died in childbirth, of so many mothers who died in their twenties
and thirties. Here, engraven on shattered and half-buried stones, is the story of an otherwise unrecorded pestilence
that snatched seven children from two pioneer families within two weeks. So, on these fallen memorials, may still
be read some of the story of a day that is long past.