Captain A.M. Collins: Millwright, Soldier, and the Pride of the Courthouse Yard

Few figures in early Hillsboro left as rich a paper trail as Captain Alvin Montgomery Collins. Between newspaper items on his courthouse gate-building, his home-built inventions, his war record, his family gatherings, and finally his obituary, a genuinely full portrait of the man emerges, one that spans nearly seventy years of Hillsboro history.

Early life and marriage

Collins was born in Espyville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania, in August 1832, and moved to Wisconsin as a young man, where he learned the trade of millwright. On June 27, 1852, in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, he married Lydia Ann Crandall, sister of Rodolph Crandall, who would later serve as Washington County judge. Lydia had been born in Medina County, Ohio, on September 24, 1834. The couple would remain married for nearly sixty years.

The Civil War and the Dakota War

Sometime after their marriage, the family moved to Mankato, Minnesota, where Collins immediately associated himself with the state militia. In 1861, like hundreds of thousands of other young men, he volunteered to go south in defense of the flag. In May 1862, he enlisted in the Twentieth Minnesota. That same year, before he’d hardly taken up his new duties, the Sioux Uprising broke out in Minnesota. There wasn’t time to regularly organize a company, but Collins gathered what citizens he could to help protect the settlers, women and children who found themselves exposed to the conflict. He saw action in several sharp engagements, including at Wood Lake, New Ulm, and Birch Coulee.

At one especially tense moment near Wood Lake, Collins’s detachment moved to engage before General Sibley’s planned reinforcements could arrive, a decision that nearly triggered disaster and drew Collins’s own citizen company under arrest for firing without orders. Aggrieved, Collins offered his resignation, first to his colonel, then directly to General Sibley himself; both men refused it and sent him back to his post.

Collins was present with the soldiers who captured Sioux fighters following the New Ulm Massacre, and it was Collins, in his capacity as a skilled millwright, who built the scaffold on which 300 Sioux men were condemned to hang, the largest planned mass execution in American history. President Lincoln personally intervened, staying the sentence for all but 39 men; one died before the scheduled execution, and the remaining 38 were hanged on December 26, 1862.

Collins was mustered out of the Twentieth Minnesota in December 1864, and re-enlisted almost immediately, on December 15, into Company F, First Minnesota Heavy Artillery. He received his commission as captain on January 14, 1865. As senior first lieutenant, he commanded the company in operations around Chattanooga, Tennessee, and served with Sherman’s forces through the close of the war, and was discharged with honors on October 9, 1865.

Coming to Oregon

The Collins family came west to Oregon around 1876, part of one of the last wagon trains before rail travel became the standard mode of transportation. They settled in Hillsboro, where Collins took up his trade as a millwright, a profession he would practice, in one form or another, for the rest of his working life. At the time, a millwright was something closer to a civil engineer, designing and building entire mill operations: water wheel systems, gear mechanisms, and the machinery itself.

His skills found grim further use in Hillsboro too. In 1880, Collins built the scaffold intended for the hanging of Henry Wintzengerode, convicted of murdering Jacob Swanger near Bethany; Wintzengerode’s sentence was ultimately commuted to life imprisonment. Later, in the 1890s, Collins built another scaffold, this one used in the actual hanging of Gus Wachline, convicted of the murder of John D. Ledrick near Blooming.

Janitor, caretaker, and inventor of the courthouse yard

For twelve years, from around 1896 until his resignation in August 1908, Collins served as janitor and caretaker of the Washington County Courthouse, at a salary of about $30 a month. It was a role he clearly took real pride in. Over the years, local papers chronicled a steady stream of small improvements: gates installed at each of the courtyard’s main entrances so visitors “from the country” could get through “without barking the skin off your heels”; a new plank walkway laid from the Main and Second gate to shorten the winter route to the courthouse; new floors laid in the main hallway and in the Assessor’s and Treasurer’s offices, replacing boards that had been in place since the building went up in 1873. The courtyard itself, described as “the pride of Capt. A.M. Collins,” bloomed each year with camas and other wildflowers, and yielded two hay crops annually under his care.

Collins’s mechanical talents extended well beyond groundskeeping. In 1902, he built a small rolling “book carriage,” a wheeled cart running on a short track, to help County Assessor Wilcox manage an unwieldy five-foot assessment roll without having to drag it across the table or reposition his chair all day. The invention proved popular enough that Collins began building and selling them elsewhere: he shipped an oak-and-brass model to the Polk County courthouse in Dallas, built another for the accounting firm of Clark & Buchanan, and shipped a further improved, foldable version to Baker City, where “wherever used, these book carriages are much liked.” At the time, the Argus reported he’d applied for a patent on the design, and predicted the carriages would soon be commonplace in courthouses and mercantile offices statewide. According to his later obituary, however, he never actually secured a patent, and the invention, popular as it was, brought him “no particular financial returns.”

Community life

Collins was deeply woven into Hillsboro civic and social life. He served as president of the Washington County Veteran Association, was a member of General Ransom Post and the Masonic fraternity, and maintained a decades-long friendship with fellow Civil War veteran Capt. M.C. Collier of Scholls, the two men having served together, “stood side by side on the battle field,” and shared, as one 1907 article charmingly put it, having “drank from the same canteen.” By coincidence, both men’s wives shared the same birthday, giving the two families a standing occasion for reunion each year.

Collins also had at least two brothers who turn up in the local record. Ben M. Collins, a Civil War veteran of Company G, 37th Wisconsin, visited Hillsboro at Christmas and was later thrown from the Glenwood stagecoach, breaking his shoulder in two places near his home at Fir. Another brother, H.A. Collins, turned up unannounced at the Hillsboro courthouse in 1899 after 25 years apart, fresh from two years prospecting in the Klondike gold fields, with plenty to say about the strictness of Canada’s mining laws.

Final years

Lydia Collins died at the family home in South Hillsboro on April 3, 1912, after nearly sixty years of marriage. She was remembered as a woman “of exceptionally sweet disposition,” active in the M.E. Church and the Woman’s Relief Corps.

Collins remained in Hillsboro for several more years, his continued vigor on display as late as 1901, when he was the proud owner of a record-setting, prize-winning “sockdollager” of an apple, the subject of a good-natured newspaper contest over who among the county’s officials might be brave enough to eat it.

In April 1917, with his health failing, Collins entered the Oregon Soldiers’ Home in Roseburg, accompanied by his old comrade M.C. Collier. But by June, he’d made up his mind to return to Hillsboro for good. “The Home is a fine institution,” he told the local paper, “but he wants to be where he can occasionally meet his friends and talk over the old times.” That August, his daughters threw him a surprise 85th birthday dinner at his South Hillsboro home, attended by Collier and a gathering of old friends and Crandall relatives.

Captain A.M. Collins died at his home on Second Street on the evening of Monday, October 1, 1917, at age 85, after an extended illness. His funeral was held under the auspices of the Masonic fraternity, of which he’d been a member for many years. He was survived by three daughters: Mrs. Eva Williams of Hillsboro, Mrs. Frances Rasmussen of Sherman County, and Mrs. Flora Magruder, reported at the time as living in Yakima, Washington, though one obituary places her back in Hillsboro by 1917. He is buried alongside Lydia, his parents, and his daughter Frances and her husband in the pioneer section of the Hillsboro Pioneer Cemetery.

Frances herself died less than a year after her father, on September 4, 1918, following surgery. She had moved back to Hillsboro from Sherman County in her father’s final years specifically to help care for him, and now rests beside him.