Warren Jacob Collins
Warren Jacob Collins was born on 24 August 1833 in Jones County, Mississippi. The date comes from the family Bible and is cut on his headstone: "W. J. Collins / Jones Co. Miss. / Aug. 24, 1833." He was the twelfth of fourteen children of Stacy Collins and Sarah Anderson. His father was a South Carolinian who had been the first tax assessor of Jones County and a captain of its militia.
About 1849 or 1850 he went to board with the family of Allen Valentine so that he could attend a private school nearby. The Valentines had a daughter, Tolitha Eboline, three years younger than he was. The courtship began there. The 1850 census found him back in his father's household in Jones County, with his brothers Newton and Edwin.
In 1852 the family moved to Texas. His brother Stacy Jr. took his own family in one ox wagon. His parents and the three younger sons, Newton, Warren and Edwin, went in another. The trip took about twenty-five days. They settled in the country that became Hardin County, near a place called Honey Island in the Big Thicket, the forest of Southeast Texas. His brother Edwin had carried two poplar seedlings from Mississippi in gourds. One lived, and the homestead was known ever after as the Old Poplar Tree Place. About a year after they arrived his father died of erysipelas.
In 1854 he went back to Mississippi to marry Eboline Valentine. He had no money for the trip, so he borrowed it from his uncle Vinson A. Collins. They married on 19 December 1854 in Jones County. He brought her back to Texas by steamboat from Mobile to Wallisville, in Chambers County. From there they rode the last sixty miles, with her clothes in her mother's meal sack.
They lived on the Old Poplar Tree Place. The 1860 census found them in Hardin County with four children: Mary, Sarah, "Cintha" and Edwin. His wife is written "Tilitha." Eleven children were born between 1855 and 1877.
He was against secession from the start. When the war came he refused to join the Confederate army. The Confederacy passed a draft law in 1862, and under it he was conscripted. He served until the battle of Galveston, fought on 1 January 1863, and then went home and did not come back. He and his brothers Newton and Stacy Jr. were among the leaders of nearly a hundred Hardin County deserters who hid in the thicket for the rest of the war. They were known as the jayhawkers. In Mississippi two more of his brothers, Jasper and Simeon, were in the armed company of deserters led by Newton Knight in Jones County. His wife's brother James Morgan Valentine was Knight's first lieutenant. His youngest brother, Edwin, had died as a Confederate soldier in January 1862.
After the war he farmed. The 1870 census found him in Justice Precinct 4 of Hardin County, and the 1880 census lists him as a farmer. In 1877 the family moved to the town of Hardin. He kept a blacksmith shop and took contract work there, and he and his sons cut railroad cross-ties at twenty cents apiece. In 1881 they moved to Tyler County near Hyatt, and later to Cypress Creek below Woodville. His wife kept boarders. In 1880 she got her first cookstove and her first sewing machine.
He helped survey the county. His obituary says he "carried the chain that measured the boundary of Hardin county." The chain was the surveyor's measuring chain, carried by hand across the ground.
He kept up with politics all his life. He became a Populist and then a Socialist. In 1912 he ran for Congress as a Socialist and stood for county judge of Hardin County on a Socialist slate.
His son Vinson wrote a frank portrait of him in 1962. He called his father "a very poor business man and indeed a bad manager." He also called him "about as smart a man as I ever knew."
In December 1915 a Beaumont newspaper marked his sixty-first wedding anniversary. By then he and Eboline were living with their children. The 1910 census found them in Hardin County in the household of their son-in-law Thomas J. Womble. The 1920 census found Warren, aged 86, in Beaumont in the household of his son Vinson, the former state senator. Eboline died at Sour Lake on 1 December 1921, after sixty-seven years of marriage.
He died on 31 January 1926 at Hicksbaugh in Tyler County, at the home of his youngest daughter, Ada Ransom. He was 92. He was buried beside Eboline in the Holland Cemetery near Village Mills in Hardin County, "on a hill overlooking Village Creek." They share one stone. His obituary counted nine living children, 57 grandchildren, 121 great-grandchildren and 15 great-great-grandchildren.
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Cite: Heirology, "Warren Jacob Collins (1833-1926)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/warren-jacob-collins-1833-1926-cef8e5.