Collins from Reed Island

Herald and Tribune (Jonesborough, Tennessee)27 Jan 1876, ThuPage 2

HANCOCK COUNTY

Mr. Editor: - In obedience to a promise made when I left Jonesboro' I will give you a few items of my trip to Sneedville.  I reached that somewhat famous town about dark on the 16th inst. the roads were extremely muddy, but being mounted on Co. I renius White's famous saddle horse, "David" I feared no evil. Sneedville is situated not far from Clinch River, in a beautiful valley at the foot of Newmans Ridge.  It contains a population of about one hundred and fifty souls, one log church, one Academy, a Court House and Jail. The original name of the place was "Greasy Rock," so called because on a certain hedge of flat rocks near the town, the Indians are said to have skinned their bears.  Hancock county was organized from a part of Hawkins County in 1848. It contains some very good farming lands, though most of the county is very rough and mountainous. It is by nature will adapted tothe growing of the grasses, and could be made one of the best counties for raising sheeep and cattle in the State.  But the people grow mostly corn, oats and wheat and boat their surplus down the Clinch River to Chattanooga in flat-boats. the county has a varied population-- a great many of the peole are industrious, enterprising and intelligent, while some are groveling, vicious and indigent.  A race of people mostly by the name of Collins and Mullins live on the top, and along the spurs of Newmans Ridge, and some of them in a fertile valley called, "Blackwater," "history tells not of their origin," but as far as I can learn from the oldest ones among them, their ancestors came there from "Reed Island" about the beginning of the present century.  They claim to be of Welsh extraction some of them are quite dark in complexion other of a deep copper color. They all have straight hair, generally dark eyes, sharp noses, thin lips, and some of them very peculiar physiognomies. They have none of the peculiar marks of the African about them, and I have no idea that they have any African blood in them. The lands cleared out and cultivated by them on Newman's Ridge are said to be rich and productive. These people were all loyal to the Unites States Government in the late war and many of them served in the Union army and made good soldiers. ..................

"VIATOR."
Rogersville, Tenn. January 1876

Fincastle County 1773 Delinquent Tax Lists: David Collens, Elisha Collens, Ambrus Collens, Samuel Collens, John Collens, Lewis Collens, John Collens Junr., George Collens, Charles Collens. On James McGavock's List of Delinquents. At a Court held for Fincastle Decr 6 1774 "This List of delinquents on New River & Reed Creek was received by the Court containing 213 Tithables and is that ought to be Received by the Vestry of the Parish of Botetourt. W. Ingles"

1783 Montgomery Co., VA:
Millinton Collins 5-10-1783
80 acres Big Reed Island Pine & Snake Cr [in modern Carroll Co.] & New River Grants 29-325
(note: Aaron Collins had a grant very near this.)

FEBRUARY 22, 1802 - Grayson County, Book 1, pages 480-481.

From Milleton Collins of Grayson County to James Bobbett of Grayson County, for 80 acres of land, lying and being on the waters of Big Reed island, the waters of New River .........[Sarah GIBSON, daughter of George Gibson married John Bobbett in Pittsylvania Co., Va., in 1764. Believe James is their son. 

Witnesses: James Bobbett Senior MILLETON COLLINS John Dalton, William Dalton ROY COLLINS

1802 Montgomery Co., VA:
Millenton and Avy Collins of Grayson Co., VA sold 80 acres on Big Reed Island to James Bobbit for 34 pds. DB 1-480 22 Feb 1802

Millenton Collins is no doubt the same man in Caswell Co., NC, [formed from Granville] with Martin, Paul, Charles and Solomon, the last removing to Georgia.

Carroll County was formed from Grayson, and Grayson from Patrick and Wythe 1792-1793.

Gibsons Documented

"Rosalie Gibson' writes;

"I have a FB page Gibsons of Old Jamestown and Louisa Co, VA. It's well documented and if you read the posts from the start, you will be clear on our origins, which are truly amazing. Henry Collins and Thomas Gibson arrived in Jamestown in 1608 and I have the family documented back to the 1640's, Jamestown area, and we were largely Indian by that early, early time."

Fact:

• Thomas Gibson arrived in Jamestown in 1608 and disappears into oblivion. He went to build a home for Powahatan after arriving, it is the last we hear of Thomas Gibson.
• In 1640 Jane Gibson was born and was identified as an "Indian woman" in court records. It is documented in those court records she had a daughter, Jane who married Morris Evans, and a son George Gibson who died without heirs. How anyone can write this Jane Gibson is documented to Thomas Gibson or to Gibby Gibson is beyond my comprehension.

We do know that in 1791 Robert Wills made a deposition; 

"he was well acquainted with Jane Gibson and George Gibson her brother who were dark mulattoes who lived in the County of Charles City and were free people; that the said Jane Gibson had two children named Jane and George Gibson and they were also free"

Later on in deposition Robert Wills testifies;

Quest. Will you please to answer the second question in this deposition more fully, you have in your answer to that question said nothing about George Gibson the elder?
Ans: I never mentioned more than one George Gibson, the Son of the elder Jane Gibson, brother to Jane Evans. [This George would be born about 1660-1670 - he can't be the George of 1656 records in CCC] If it be so expressed in my former deposition it was misconceived, I never did know any but one of that name. And further this deponent saith not.

Jane Gibson, the elder, may or may not have had a brother George Gibson. It seems clear she had a son George, who died without heirs according to the pedigree sheet, but it appears she did not have a brother named George. 

Sometime in the mid 1650s to mid 1660s living on Upper Chippoakes Creek was George Gibson and wife Mary, called Goodwife Gibson. That is the first documented Gibson we have in the area since Thomas Gibson's arrival in 1608. Fifty years have went by. We do not know what happened to the first Thomas Gibson, did he go back to England? Was he killed by Indians?  He is not on the 'Living and Dead' census of 1623. Did he marry into the Powhatan tribe and is the father of Jane and/or George of Charles City County?

court

Calloway Collins

This sketch of Calloway Collins, grandson of "A FULL-BLOODED CHEROKEE" accompanied the article by Will Allen Dromgoole on her trip to Newmans Ridge.  See scan below.

This sketch is found in Wikipedia article on the Melungeons.  Who sketched this and who added it to Wikepedia.  Where did this sketch come from?  There is more that a 'subtle' difference in these two sketches.  Why does the second one say it is a 'typical Melungeon' it looks nothing like Calloway Collins? It says it was "Drawn from a photograph taken by Will Allen Dromgoole" but the above is the sketch made by the artist that accompanied Ms Dromgoole to Newmans Ridge.

On the Olive Tree Genealogy Blog,  Lorine McGinnis Schulze had added to the sketch "Credits: "A typical malungeon" was published in 1890 by Will Allen Dromgoole, it found in Nashville Sunday American, August 31, 1890 


Why does the 'Typical Melungeon" appear August 31st in Nashville newpspaper and 'Calloway Collins' whose grandfather was full blood Cherokee appear in the Oregon newpspaper two weeks later?   

Did Dromgoole's artist sketch both of these?  Is the second one the man Dromgoole refers to as 'King" in THE LAST OF THE MALUNGEONS

Indians of Hancock County Tennessee

Indians of Hancock County, Tennessee

The Cherokee Boundary of 1785 went through Sneedville as did the Kentucky Road [Wilderness Trail] as the map below shows. 

I have not found the source for this nor can I vouch for it's accuracy;

John Reed Swanton's Indians of the Southeastern United StatesBulletin 137 of the Bureau of American Ethnology,Smithsonian Institution, 1946.

''Swanton reported that there were three bands of the Yuchi (Uchee or Euchee): a southern one centered near the present Macon, Georgia; a middle one near the present Talladega, Alabama; and a northern one centered on Newman's Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee. The northern band were not among the Yuchi forced to relocate in Indian Territory in the 1830s. They were settled on the Qualla Reservation with the Eastern Cherokee band and allowed one representative on the tribal council. All deliberations were in Cherokee, which none of the Yuchi understood (understandable, since Cherokee belongs to the Iroquoian language stock and Yuchi to the Siouan one).   After two years of feeling like strangers among the Cherokees, the Yuchi left and returned to Newman's Ridge.''

It is interesting though that the "Emassees and Malunjins show up together in Dothan, Alabama.

THE EMASSEES AND MALUNJINS

One tribe of Indians and a community of mixed breed Indians were unmolested by the whites. These were the Uchees or Emassees, kinsman of the Seminoles or Creeks, who lived at the mouth of the Emassee or O'Mussee or Mercer creek near Columbia, and the Malunjins, a mixed breed community residing some three to six miles northeast of Dothan toward Webb even as late as 1865. Where the Malunjins came from nobody knows; where they were dispersed to is the limbo of forgotten men. B. P. Poyner, Sr., father of Houston County Probate Judge, S.P.Poyner, was born in the Malunjins' community. Some of these mixed breed Indians brought milk to Mr. Poyner's mother while he was an infant. The Emassees were allied by affinity with the Creeks and Seminoles yet during all of Alabama's territorial and state days were friendly to the whites. Only a squatter white family settled  here and there and lived in old Henry County prior to 1817. Save for these squatters there were no  white settlers in Henry County at the time of the Creek War of 1812-13. The Alabama Lawyer: Official Organ State Bar of AlabamaBy Alabama State BarPublished by The Bar, 1942

On November 6, 1837, the Hawkins County Land Platt Book records the survey for James Livesay of 500 acres of land on an "Indian village on the waters of Painter [Panther Creek]  on the north side of Clinch River."

THE MORRISTOWN  GAZETTE

NOTES AND DOTS

Sneedville, Aug. 16, 1878.To the Editor of the Morristown Gazette :

Where the village of Sneedville is situated was once an Indian town. There are any quantity of flints half finished, scattered about over a wide extent in and around the village, showing that this was a place where they manufactured darts for their arrows, with which they killed their game. Many battle-axes, tomahawks, pestles, and remnants of Instruments and vessels of pottery used by the aborigines have been picked up in years gone by, so that now they are seldom found. Within a quarter of a mile of the court-house there is still visible a round-shaped knoll which may be a mound. It was once much sharper than it now is, so sharp that cattle never resorted to it for rest. It has been ploughed over and cultivated; and is now very much flattened.. I have seen many mounds, and am inclined to express it as my opinion that this - is a regular mound. Right here, allow me to say that I am in correspondence with the officers of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D. C, who request me to collect all evidences of these singular formations, and transmit information and specimens to them. which I am doing, and respectfully request those who have any Indian battle-axes, tomahawks, arrow heads pottery, or other implements or trinkets once in posession of the Indians who formerly roamed over this country as "lords of creation," to send them to me at Morristown.

Notes And Dots

Mysteries Secrets & Lies

Secrets 

This piece  Mystery in the mountains: The forgotten faces of Appalachia 

from WVLT in Knoxville Tennessee was posted this morning.  This is 

typical of the pieces being put out by television, magazines, books, 

speakers, etc., and it is plain ridiculous. 

 In 1848 a journalist from Kentucky, likely hearing of the illegal voting trial involving the 'Meluneons', went to Newman's Ridge.  There he stayed at the 'Inn' of Vardy Collins and wife Peggy Gibson.

This journalist called Vardy the 'chief cook and bottlewasher of the Melungeons' and it was no doubt Vardy and Peggy Collins who told him the "Legend of the Melungeons."

"The legend of their history, which they carefully preserve, is this. A great many years ago, these mountains were settled by a society of Portuguese Adventurers, men and women--who came from the long-shore parts of Virginia, that they might be freed from the restraints and drawbacks imposed on them by any form of government. These people made themselves friendly with the Indians and freed, as they were from every kind of social government, they uprooted all conventional forms of society and lived in a delightful Utopia of their own creation ....... These intermixed with the Indians, and subsequently their descendants (after the advances of the whites into this part of the state) with the negros and the whites, thus forming the present race of Melungens."

Ok so where is the SECRET?  Exactly what was it they were 'afraid to tell' the journalist?  Where was their "self-preservation" in 1848?  Why would they create this 'legend' if it were not true and exactly what secret could they be hiding? They said they were Portuguese adventurers who mixed with the Indians. It was no more dangerous to be an 'Indian' than it was to be African, both would have been enslaved or marched off to the reservation.  Just a few generations before this the Indians were capturing and cooking the pioneers.

They said they mixed with whites and BLACKS when they got to Tennessee! What was the SECRET, what were they hiding, what did they forget on purpose?
These people were hardy pioneers who had lived in the mountains, fought in the Revolution, fought off Indians, the tax man, etc.  They were probably forced off their lands in Louisa County in the 1740s and many of them came from the Indian trading families. Some were at Jamestown in early 1600s.  And people expect us to believe they were AFRAID to tell who they really were?

Hernando deSoto

J.G. Rhea to Martha Collins - 1918 

"Now about the Collins boys, I knew when I was a boy Navarrh, or as he was called, "Vardy" Collins was a fine old patriarch, said to be of Portuguese Nationality coming to this country with De Soto

How could it be that "we can't go back far enough" to validate the Portuguese mixed with the Indians when the deSoto journals are full of stories of the Portuguese [and Spanish and Genoans] mixing with the Indians?   "We can't go back far enough" to find how they got here? The deSoto journals tell exactly how they got here, how Andre de Vasconcelos  received a ship for his Portuguese sailors from deSoto.

"In the month of April, of the year 1538, the adelantado (deSoto) delivered the ships over to the captains who were to go in them. He took a new and good sailing ship for himself and gave one to Andre de Vasconcelos, in which the Portuguese went"   (Here)

The Portuguese definitely mixed with the Indians, just as Vardy Collins told the journalis in 1848.  From the de Soto Journals (Found Here)

• They captured a hundred head, among Indian men and women. Of the latter, there, as well as in any other part where forays were made, the captain selected one or two for the governor and the others were divided among themselves and those who went with them.
• As soon as the governor had crossed the stream, he found a village called Achese a short distance on. Although the Indians had never heard of Christians they plunged into a river. A few Indians, men and women, were seized,
• At the time of his departure, because of the importunity of some who wished more than was proper, he asked the cacique for thirty Indian women as slaves.....The Indians gave the governor thirty Indian women and the necessary tamemes [for DeSoto's men to wed then populate his planned settlement at Mobile Bay].

And this piece wants us to believe they 'forgot on purpose' who they were when they told the journalist in 1848 exactly who they were, they didn't forget anything.

Fifteen years before deSoto there was Lucian deAyllon who brought 600 colonist and 100 slaves to Winyah Bah and the Pee Dee River, most researchers agree some of these people, including the slaves went off to live with the Indians along the Pee Dee River, only 150 people returned to Spain. (Early Contacts)

Twenty six years after deSoto Juan Pardo explored the same area of the Pee Dee River as deAyllon and deSoto.  There are many articles of Pardo's soldiers "indiscretions" with Indian women and at least two marriages between soldiers and the Indian women.

Is it really a leap to believe the Melungeons are descendants of these Portugese and Indian men and women?   To date the only court documented case of Melungeons was in Hamilton Co., Tennessee and it is reported and documented they were on the Pee Dee River in early 1700s.  (The Famous Melungeon Case)

They told this same story to Will Allen Dromgoole who published The Four Branches in 1890, The Gibson and Collins were Indians, the Goins were African and the Denham were Portuguese.  This is the exact "legend' told to the journalist 50 years before. (The Melungeon Tree and It's Four Branches)

Again in 1897  the legend was repeated to  Rev. C. H. Humble, in an article "A Visit to the Melungeons.

"The first settlers here were the great grand parents, Varday Collins, Shephard Gibson, and Charley Williams, who came from Virginia it is said, though other say from North Carolina. They have marked Indians resemblances in color, feature, hair, carriage, and disposition. 

The second settlers were from North Carolina; they were the Goans, Miners, and Bells; they were charged with having negro blood in them and, before the war, were prosecuted on this ground for illegal voting, but were acquitted. They explained their peculiarities by claiming a Portuguese origin. 

Later Came Jim Mullens, an Englishman, who married a Collins, and whose son John married Mehala Collins, to be referred to again. Jim Moore, a British sailor, also settled here, and married a daughter of old Charley Gibson,"  

Lacking the Portuguese Denham this is the same 'legend'  they told in Dromgoole- The Indians, Africans, Portuguese and English, just as they had told the journalist in 1848.

This is not one of those "theories of origin" - this is exactly who they said they were and where they came from. There is no SECRET there is no MYSTERY!
These myths that 'they said they were Portuguese to hide African ancestry is a joke. They told journalists every chance they got exactly who they were, they said they mixed with blacks in 1848 they were NOT covering up nothing!    The only mystery is why are these people in Vardy/Newman's Ridge allowing this so called mystery to carry on, promoting secrets and lies?  Yes, lies, because if they don't believe the 1848 Legend of the Melungeons, as told by Vardy Collins, or the history told to Dromgoole by Calloway Collins or Beatty Collins who gave the information to C.H. Humble then yes, they are reducing their ancestors to a bunch of deceitful, lying pioneers hiding their African ancestry!