William Trucks was born in 1742 in Baltimore County, Maryland, the son of George (1724) and Susannah Trucks.¹  

William and his brother John both enlisted in the German Regiment of Maryland in the Continental Army on 21 July 1776 in Baltimore County, Maryland. The brothers began their service in Captain Keyport’s company of the German Regiment.^{2 p. 83} William was promoted to Sergeant on 1 March 1777 and later commissioned as an Ensign on 25 July 1778. John was promoted to Corporal by September of 1778 and later promoted to Sergeant.^{2 p. 83} 

In December of 1776, the German Regiment was ordered to join Washington’s army, which was then retreating across New Jersey. The continental army crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania on 7 December 1776. The German regiment was commanded by Colonel Nicholas Haussegger, and on 8 December 1776, the regiment became a part of Brigadier General Matthieu Fermoy’s brigade within Major General Nathaniel Greene’s division of Washington’s Continental Army.^{2 p. 7} On Christmas morning, the regiment was ordered to make ready for a march, and they crossed the Delaware River back into New Jersey around midnight. 

The brigade was later ordered to secure the Princeton/Trenton Road to prevent reinforcements from reaching the Hessians at Trenton. En route, they came upon the Knyphausen Regiment of Hessians and exchanged fire. Within a short time, they had captured the entire Knyphausen Regiment. Fermoy’s brigade then returned to camp in Pennsylvania.^{2 p. 8} 

On 30 December, they again crossed the Delaware into New Jersey and began marching toward Princeton. When they were within a half mile of Princeton, junior officers became concerned because they knew the enemy occupied Princeton. Major Ludwick Weltner challenged Colonel Haussegger on the wisdom of approaching closer without reinforcements. Colonel Haussegger said that he would take ten men and reconnoiter. When he arrived in Princeton, he knocked on a door and turned over the ten men to the Hessian Commander Colonel von Donop. Von Donop paid Haussegger, and the plan had clearly been to deliver the entire regiment, but it was foiled by Major Ludwick Weltner.^{2 p. 9} 

On 30 June 1778, Colonel John Butler, the Tory chief of the Mohawk Valley, marched into the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania with some 400 British troops and from 500 to 700 Seneca and Cayuga Nation warriors. They appeared on the crest of a ridge and began a methodical march into the valley, burning farms and lesser forts as they advanced.^{4 p. 139}

The majority of settlers swarmed into the main stockade at Kingston.^{4 p. 145} The able-bodied men inside the fort, all of them battle-hardened veterans of the Pennamite wars,^3,5 were filled with rage and horror at the destruction being wrought before their eyes. They immediately determined that they must stop the invaders. On 3 July 1778, almost every man in the fort marched out to do battle.^{4 p. 146}

No more than 450 were in the battalion, including old men and boys. When Colonel Butler saw the militia march forth, he told his Native American allies to slip into the woods behind the ridge and go forward at full speed, and at the same time, he ordered his English troops to slow their advance. As the Yankees plunged onward, the trap was sprung. The Native American warriors attacked the American rear in full force. The result was a hideously brutal defeat of the Kingston settlers, marked by butchery and torture plainly visible to those left inside the fort. There were 303 known deaths, and estimates of the total dead ranged up to 400.^{4 p. 143}

On 24 March 1779, General Washington ordered Brigadier General Edward Hand to move the German Regiment plus Armand’s and Schott’s Corps to Fort Wyoming (current day Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania). At the time of the German Regiment’s arrival on 11 April 1779, Fort Wyoming was an island in the Native American-controlled Wyoming Valley.^{2 p. 28}

William and John had signed up for a term of enlistment of three years.⁸  That term of enlistment was up in July 1779, and they both chose to leave the army and remain in the Wyoming Valley as civilians for some time. William resigned on 1 July 1779, and John was discharged on July 24.^{2 p. 30} 

Over 300 men of less than a thousand in the Wyoming Valley had been killed only a year earlier by the British and allies. Fort Wyoming was described as an island in the Native American-controlled Wyoming Valley.^{2 p. 28}  So William’s and John’s presence in the valley as war-hardened veterans would certainly have been welcomed by the residents and the army. In addition to patriotic and humanitarian motivations, they may also have been motivated by the presence of approximately 300 widows that had been left behind, many of whom would have been landowners. Around the time of his discharge, William (1742) married Mrs. Mehetable McCoy Buck, whose previous husband, Asahel Buck, had been killed on 18 February 1779 by Native American warriors.^{4 p. 173}   

William remained in that area of Pennsylvania for quite some time and raised a family there. The book, History of the Certified Township of Kingston, Pennsylvania, 1769 – 1929, mentions William and his contributions to the area. “In 1796, William and Mehetable were living in Kingston Township of the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania and already had extensive land holdings in Kingston and in the neighboring township of Bedford. William was a carpenter and millwright and served as Justice of the Peace in Kingston. 

He served on the Proprietors Committee and was a leader of public affairs. He was, perhaps, the leading and most progressive citizen in the territory over the mountain. He was a strong participant in the development of the Kingston area. By 1801, William had already bought a large plot of land upon which most of the current-day town of Dallas, Pennsylvania is built.”^{4 p. 292}

“In 1803, he bought land along Toby Creek, and by 1804 he had built a sawmill and a home of logs with two rooms on the main floor, a center chimney, and two fireplaces. He had also accumulated 816 acres of land and had built a large grist mill of logs two stories high, with one pair of millstones cut out by himself from local conglomerate rock.”^{4 p. 292}  Also, by around 1804, a little village known as Trucksville had grown up around the mills.^{4 p. 291} Trucksville is a census-designated place in Kingston Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The population was 2,152 at the 2010 census.⁸ In 1811, William moved his family to Wayne, Knox County, Ohio.

The Patriot died on 19 November 1831 of throat cancer. When he died, he was living in Richland County, Ohio, with his son, William (1780), and his wife, Lydia (Fuller) Trucks⁶  Mehetable McCoy Buck Trucks had died some years before her husband. William left behind three children, his eldest son George Joseph (1779), who had been erroneously presumed dead, William (1780), and Susanna born in 1791.⁶ 

Sources:

1. Ancestry.com. Find a Grave Index, 1600s – Current.
2. https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/118450924:60525?ssrc=pt&tid=156211003&pid=192059309826   
3. Retzger, Henry J., The German Regiment of Maryland and Pennsylvania, Maryland. Westminster: Heritage Books Inc., 1996.
4. The Wyoming Valley and all of Northeastern Pennsylvania had been granted under royal charter to both the colonies of Connecticut (the Yankees) and of Pennsylvania (the Pennamites). This was not a source of conflict in the early days, as the Susquehannock Nation controlled the area. 
5. By 1769, Native Americans' control began to wane in the Wyoming Valley, and conflict between colonies began to flare into the Yankee Pennamite wars. Three rather small wars were fought with the conflict ending in 1788. Congress upheld the claims of Pennsylvania but also upheld the validity of individual settler’s land titles that had been granted by Connecticut., thus converting some Yankees to Pennamites.4  
6. Brewster, William, History of the Certified Township of Kingston, Pennsylvania 1769 – 1929: The School District of the Borough of Kingston, 1930.
7. “Pennamite-Yankee War.” Wikipedia, 12 September 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pennamite%E2%80%93Yankee_War&action=history  
8. Settlement of Estate Papers for William Trucks (1742) 
9. “Trucksville, Pennsylvania.”  Wikipedia, 2 November 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trucksville,_Pennsylvania 
10. “German Marylanders.” 3 January 2022, https://www.germanmarylanders.org/