Tolitha Eboline Valentine
Tolitha Eboline Valentine was born on 22 September 1836 in Jones County, Mississippi. She went by Eboline. A memorial gives her birthplace as George's Camp in Jones County. Her father, Allen Valentine, was a South Carolinian; her mother, Cynthia Welch, was from Georgia. Her birth is entered in the Valentine family Bible. She was the third of eleven children.
She grew up on her father's farm. As a girl she drove flocks of about a hundred turkeys to market at Mobile, on the Alabama coast. At night on the road the birds roosted in saplings bent down for them. Before she married she had learned to spin and weave. The 1850 census lists her at thirteen as "Lelitha."
About 1849 or 1850 a boy from another Jones County family came to board in the Valentine house so that he could attend a private school. He was Warren Collins, three years older than she was. His family moved to Texas in 1852. Two years later he came back to marry her. They were married in Jones County on 19 December 1854. She was eighteen.
The trip to Texas went by steamboat from Mobile to Wallisville, in Chambers County. From there they rode sixty miles to Hardin County. Her clothes went in her mother's meal sack. They settled on the Old Poplar Tree Place near Honey Island, in the Big Thicket.
She had eleven children between 1855 and 1877. The 1860 census, which spells her "Tilitha," already shows four. During the Civil War her husband deserted the Confederate army and hid with other Unionists in the thicket. In Mississippi her brother James Morgan Valentine was first lieutenant of Newton Knight's company of deserters in Jones County.
She spun at night, often until nine or ten o'clock. In 1877 the family moved to the town of Hardin, and she kept boarders there. In 1880 she got her first cookstove and her first sewing machine. The family later moved to Tyler County. In all, her obituary said, she lived in Hardin, Tyler, Polk and Jefferson counties, "but for the most part in Hardin county."
Two of her sons died before her. Simeon Hamil, the family's best fiddler, died in 1888 at eighteen. Morgan was killed at Saratoga in June 1915. That December a Beaumont paper marked her sixty-first wedding anniversary. The 1910 census found her and Warren in the household of their son-in-law Thomas J. Womble, where she is listed as "Eb T."
She died on 1 December 1921 at Sour Lake, at the home of her son Fillmore. She was 85. All her children but two were with her. She was buried the next afternoon in the Holland Cemetery near Village Mills. Her husband was buried beside her four years later, and they share a stone.
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Cite: Heirology, "Tolitha Eboline Valentine (1836-1921)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/tolitha-eboline-valentine-1836-1921-04dc3e.