THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
In
praise of a noble mountain man: Dr. Mauney Douglas Collins
Union
County has produced some worthy citizens.
One of them was Dr. Mauney Douglas Collins, an extraordinary
educator.
Some men are of an age and a place;
others are timeless and of inestimable station.
Such a man was Dr. Mauney Douglas Collins, lowly in beginnings
but
propelled by his extraordinary vision and inordinate accomplishments.
This noble mountain man had been a
farmer, a merchant, a teacher, a banker, an evangelist, a pastor, a
lecturer, a
writer, an editor, and an administrator.
But what of his beginnings? From
what roots did this mountain man spring?
Born in
His paternal grandparents were Francis
and Rutha Nix Collins and his maternal grandparents were Marion and
Rebecca
Goforth Jackson. His great-grandparents,
Thompson and Celia Self Collins, were early settlers in
Reared as a farm lad, Mauney Douglas
Collins learned early to shoulder responsibilities.
Choestoe District where his family lived had
good farm land. Archibald Benjamin
Collins, Mauney’s father, was a farmer of note and a tradesman, dealing
in
sheep, cattle and hogs. Ben and his
brother, “Bud” Collins (Francis Jasper) had the first threshing machine
in the
district. They served
Ben Collins was a country store
merchant. Much of the trade at his store
was in barter. He took in payment for
store goods such farm and forest products as eggs, chickens, sorghum
syrup,
dried apples, chestnuts, chinquapins, herbs and tanned skins of animals.
These bartered goods he hauled over
the mountainous Logan Turnpike to the market in Gainesville and there
traded
them for coffee, sugar, piece goods, nails and other hardware, and
various
‘store-bought’ commodities.
Ben Collins drove livestock over this
same route to market, and in
When the gold mine opened in the Coosa
District of Union County northwest of Choestoe, Ben Collins established
his
second store there.
Mauney
Collins, as a very young lad, was involved in the entrepreneurships of
his
father and uncle, learning from them by going on trade excursions and
by
working in the stores.
When Mauney Collins was five years
old, he started school at Old Liberty, a one-room building serving as
both a
school and church. His uncle, Tom
Jackson, was the boy’s first teacher.
The young child showed great promise as a student.
He studied from well-worn textbooks passed
down from his older sister Nina and cousins.
The school term lasted at the most four months, conducted at
periods
when work on the farm was not as demanding.
In 1897 a tragedy struck the Collins
family and the whole community. It was
the year of the great typhoid epidemic.
All in the family took the dreaded fever and struggled to
survive. A hard-working housekeeper,
Sallie Kimsey,
helped the Collins family during that trying time.
Dr. McCravey made his weary rounds by horseback
from Blairsville, eight miles away, doing what he could to attend the
family
with the medicines available then.
On
Bereft, his young widow, Mary Louise
Jackson Collins, gradually regained her strength from the effects of
the
fever. She began evaluating ways to rear
her family of seven. The second child,
Francis Arthur, had died at age one in 1884.
Mauney Douglas was eleven when his father died.
The eldest, Nina Idaho, was fifteen, and the
baby, Dorothy Dora, was only one month old,
It was to be a hard road in a good
land.
(Next week: More on the life of Dr. M. D. Collins.)
c2003 by
Ethelene Dyer
Jones; published September 25, 2003 in The Union Sentinel, Blairsville,
GA. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
[Ethelene Dyer
Jones is a retired educator,
freelance writer, poet, and historian. She may be reached at
e-mail [email protected];
phone 478-453-8751; or mail 1708 Cedarwood Road, Milledgeville, GA
31061-2411.]
Updated
February 5, 2009
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