Perhaps there's no comparison that better illustrates the capriciousness of the frontier's historical record — the traces in contemporary histories, official documents and personal anecdotes — left to the present day researcher than the contrast between what can be found about William Templeton (II) and what is known about his contemporary, John McCollum.

They both lived in the Scotch-Irish enclaves of Western Pennsylvania after the Revolutionary War. They both pressed on west to the Youngstown area of the Northwest Territories by 1798. Both fought in the War of 1812. However, w e have nearly no record of William Templeton's actions and associations through this time. John McCollum, on the other hand, left a documentary swath that speaks of an interesting, courageous patriot and pioneer.

McCollum arrived to settle among the clearing parcels of land surrounding Youngstown and Austintown in the Connecticut Reserve of northeast Ohio in 1798.1 He was certainly already familiar with the country.

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McCollum had been with General "Mad Anthony" Wayne on August 20, 1794, when Wayne's 3,500-man "Legion of the United States" (the precursor of the modern U.S. Army) met a similar number of Indian warriors, two companies of Upper Canadian militia, and a few British Indian Department advisers, "in Indiana near Fort Wayne,"2 according to Templeton family chroniclers. The ensuing Battle of Fallen Timbers was decisive in opening the Northwest Territories for settlement by colonists of the newly-minted United States.

Wayne's campaign against the confederated tribes of of Wyandot, Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee, Miami, Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Ojibwa warriors on the far western frontier of the time — the forest and swampy lowlands of Ohio and Indiana —was the military venture that secured the safety of William Templeton and his fellow frontiersmen: the early, un-protected settlers of the contested lands west of Fort Pitt – up til Treaty of Greenville of August, 1795 – that insisted upon poking around and opening promising lands for the White Man, westward.

Even though William Templeton (II) had been fording rivers and streams in order to carry the U.S. mail on contract to a Pittsburgh entrepreneur as early as 1795,3 and had joined with friends that were also blazing trails and roads into the tangled forests of eastern Ohio for two- or three years already by the time the adventurer, John McCollum finally settled upon his mid-life task of clearing and farming the lands that he'd fought to win from the Red Man, McCollum has his name recorded as the "first settler" of Austintown Township and owner of the first cabin raised,4 while William Templeton rests in frustrating obscurity.

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John McCollum was born in New Jersey, December 25, 1770, and returned to that State after the campaign in the Territories. There, he married a widowed woman, Jane (Ayers) Hampson. He gathered up his new family and took them, via Washington County, Pennsylvania, to the now relatively safe tracts of the Connecticut Reserve.* Jane Hampson, a "Mayflower" (or nearly) doyen out of New Jersey, was the mother of William Templeton II's wife, Elizabeth Hampson.

John McCollum returned to the western-most outpost of "civilization" and there found hearty Scots-Irish frontiersmen and women busy clearing farms from the forest – probably often without benefit of Land Agent or County Clerk notation. McCollum quickly became linked by marriage and common community to many of the handful of families that had actually braved the primordial forest of Ohio and put some "sweat equity" into their claim to the land. ...The official owners of the land were settled speculators such as "Judge Austin" hadn't swung an axe on their property, but had lobbied halls of government to lay claim to the parceling out of property on the frontier.

His experience as a frontier fighter were put to use again in the War of 1812, when he served for a short while under Colonel William Rayen.4

Wherever the laurels of History come to rest, we know that both John McCollum and William Templeton had already opened the region around Austintown, Youngstown, and Warren — had blazed trails into the confluence of the Meander and Salt Creeks — and had built a home, there, when many of the more "illustrious" town fathers arrived to found the cities we now know.

McCollum died on April 7, I849, the pater familias of eight children and five step-children, and their many "Early Ohio" offspring.

* Note: The Editor will document our belief that Austintown's immediate environs were not officially part of the Connecticut Reserve, but were surrounded by it, at a later date.

Other notes

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NOTES:

1. History of Trumbull and Mahoning Counties with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches, Vol. II, H.Z. Williams & Bro., Cleveland, 1882, p. 127.
2. doc. 0015 "FHT-GLT Papers", collection of the Editor.
3. (See: William Templeton II.)
4. History, op. cit.
5. History, op. cit.