Ancestors

Vinson Allen Collins

Vinson Allen Collins was born on 1 March 1867 at the Old Poplar Tree Place, his family's homestead near Honey Island in Hardin County, Texas. The homestead lay in the Big Thicket, the forest country of Southeast Texas. He was the seventh of eleven children of Warren Jacob Collins and Tolitha Eboline Valentine. He was named for his father's brother Vinson A. Collins of Mississippi, the uncle who had lent Warren the money to go back and marry. The 1870 census lists him at three simply as "Allen."

He was born two years after the Civil War ended, in a county where his father had been one of the leading deserters from the Confederate army. The family called the boy Yank. The 1959 family genealogy says it was because he was "such a roly-poly, pink-faced boy in the midst of the poor South of post Civil War days, that folks said no one but a Yankee could be that fat and well fed." With a Unionist father, the name may well have carried a second meaning.

He grew up poor. In his own account he went barefoot until he was five, and two long-tailed shirts were all the clothes he had. In 1877 the family moved to the town of Hardin, where his father kept a blacksmith shop. At twelve he left school to make railroad cross-ties with his father and brothers, at twenty cents a tie. In 1881 the family moved again, to Tyler County near Hyatt.

On 9 January 1886, when he was nearly nineteen, he left home after his father made him sell the hogs he had raised. He walked through sleet and snow to Polk County and took farm work near Menard Chapel at $12.50 a month. From his wages he saved his first stake, $67.50. He went back for eight months of school, passed the county teachers' examination at Livingston, and began teaching at Big Sandy in Polk County for $35 a month. About 1889 he was baptized in Menard Creek. He was a Baptist for the rest of his life.

On 29 August 1889, at Moscow in Polk County, he married Elizabeth Stedman Hopkins, called Lizzie. She was nineteen, the daughter of John Alexander Hopkins, a Methodist who had brought his family from Alabama in 1875. Lizzie encouraged him to finish his education. He entered the Sam Houston Normal Institute at Huntsville, the state's college for teachers, and she ran a boardinghouse to keep him there. He graduated in 1893; his obituary says cum laude.

Their first child, a son, died as an infant in 1890. Carr Pritchett was born near Chester in Tyler County on 12 May 1892, and Halley Houston in December 1893. The family genealogy says the two boys were named for two of his professors at Huntsville. A daughter, Lois Qualena, was born in February 1895 and died that August. Jessie May was born in 1897. After Huntsville he went back to teaching.

Lizzie died on 13 April 1900, at thirty. She was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Chester. In 1901 he passed the bar examination and began to practice law. On 14 December 1902 he married Nannie Kuykendall of Grand Saline, the daughter of E. R. Kuykendall. They had four children: Allene in 1904, Warren Kuykendall, called Kirk, in 1906, Lillian Mae in 1908, and Jack Dies in 1910.

He practiced law in Beaumont and entered politics there. In 1910 he was elected to the Texas Senate from the 4th District, which covered Southeast Texas. He served from January 1911 to January 1915, and again from September 1917 to January 1919. In 1913 he wrote the Texas workmen's compensation act. It paid workers hurt on the job through insurance, and it created an Industrial Accident Board to run the system. His son Carr became the board's first secretary. At his death, fifty-three years later, his obituary called it "the original workmen's compensation law which still is the basic labor law of Texas."

He sponsored other labor laws. The Dallas Morning News credited him in 1953 with the eight-hour day for workmen on public projects, and with co-sponsoring the suspended sentence law. A later newspaper column added an act against child labor and a law limiting a working woman's day to nine hours.

In 1917 Governor James E. Ferguson was impeached. Collins sat on the committee that wrote the judgment against him, and Ferguson was removed from office. Nearly forty years later Collins still believed "that he and his colleagues did the right thing."

He twice ran for Congress from the 2nd District. In one race he finished second in a field of six won by Martin Dies Sr. In 1924 he ran for governor and placed sixth of nine. The field included Miriam A. "Ma" Ferguson, the wife of the governor he had helped remove. His son Carr, then living in Dallas, paid for that campaign. In 1928 he campaigned for Herbert Hoover.

His father, Warren, lived with him in his last years. The 1920 census found the household in Beaumont: Vinson, Nannie, four children and Warren, aged 86. By the time his mother died in December 1921, he had moved to Dallas. The 1930 census found him there.

From 1935 to 1950 he sat on the Board of Regents of the State Teachers Colleges, and his obituary says he was its chairman. In September 1938 he was keynote speaker and temporary chairman of the State Democratic Convention at Beaumont. By 1940 he had moved to Polk County, and the 1950 census lists him at Livingston as a "General Lawyer." He kept practicing until 1957, when he was ninety.

He did not drink. He told a reporter in 1953 that he had not touched liquor since he was sixteen. He was a lifelong prohibitionist, and the newspaper headed its story "Ardent Prohibitionist." He also said that in all but one of his races he took no campaign money from outside the family.

Nannie died on 26 March 1960. In 1962, at ninety-five, he dictated a book about his parents for his relatives.

He died in Dallas on 5 July 1966. He was 99. His funeral was held at the Central Baptist Church of Livingston, and he was buried in the Livingston Cemetery, also called Forest Hill.

If Vinson Allen Collins is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Vinson Allen Collins (1867-1966)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/vinson-allen-collins-1867-1966-802ac1.