Redford - Generations of Somerset Place:

A widowed Josiah Collins I (17351819) and his two minor children, Josiah Jr. (17631839) and Ann (Nancy) Collins Blount (17651796), immigrated to America from England in 1773. Collins spent his life in America creating wealth through visionary business ventures and carving out a prominent place for his progeny within the prevailing economic, political, social, and religious institutions of the time. Among his business ventures was orchestrating the transformation of an uninhabited, jungle-like terrain into Somerset Place plantation through the extensive use of enslaved laborers. One copy of this oil-on-canvas portrait, possibly painted around 1810, hangs in the office of the Collins Family Home at Somerset Place.

During the 19th century, itinerant miniaturists routinely visited small towns, whose population could not support a resident artist, and offered their services painting miniature portraits of local residents. The images were typically painted on ivory, encased in a frame, and positioned in a special portable display case. Josiah Collins Jr. (18631839), heir to the properties his father, Josiah Collins I, owned in Edenton, North Carolina, may have posed for one of the itinerant painters who visited there. His Edenton inheritance included the family home, called the Homestead, where his family lived. Somerset Place passed directly from Josiah I to his eight minor grandchildren with Josiah Jr. managing the plantation until his oldest son, Josiah Collins III, reached adulthood and established a home place for his family at Somerset.

Ann Rebecca Daves Collins (17851833), daughter of John and Mary Haynes Long Daves, wed Josiah Collins Jr. in 1803. Over the next 23 years, she gave birth to eight children: Ann Daves Collins Shepard, Mary Matilda Collins Page, Josiah Collins III, Henrietta Elizabeth Collins Page, Hugh Williamson Collins, John Daves Collins, Louisa McKinley Collins Harrison Stickney, and Elizabeth Alethea Collins Warren. Today this ornately framed portrait of Ann Collins hangs in the dining room of the Collins Family Home at Somerset Place.

Josiah Collins III (18081863) established a family home at Somerset Place shortly after his 1829 marriage to Mary Riggs Collins of New Jersey. By 1860, Somerset Place was the third largest slaveholding plantation in North Carolina. Josiah III and Mary had six sons, three of whom survived to maturity: Josiah IV, George, and Arthur. Two sons, Edward and Hugh, drowned in a Somerset canal, and a third son, William, lost his life in a riding accident. Josiah III directed the construction of a 14-room house at Somerset Place known today as the Collins Family Home. The oil-on-canvas portrait pictured here adorns the wall of his home.

This picture of Mary Riggs Collins (18081872) captures the outward appearance of 19th-century women in mourning. The image was probably made soon after her husband, Josiah Collins III, died without warning in 1863. Customarily for at least a year after their husbands death, women of Marys social position dressed in black, donned black-trimmed head coverings, carried white silk mourning handkerchiefs trimmed in black, and often wore special mourning pins containing a lock of hair from the deceased loved one. Mary Collins died at Somerset Place in 1872.

Commissioned a first lieutenant in the Confederate army, Josiah Collins IV (18301890) was heir to the Collins Family Home at Somerset Place. When the Civil War ended in April 1865, so did slavery. Nearly all of the former slaves had left Somerset Place to seek a life elsewhere by November 1865. Left without unpaid labor, the Collins family could no longer maintain the plantation. Josiah IV had to rely on his training as a lawyer to support his family. This oil painting (now at Somerset Place) was possibly commissioned after the war using a wartime tintype as the source.