Edward Knight Collins
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Edward Knight Collins I (5 August 1802 – 22 January 1878) was an American shipping magnate.
He was born in Truro, Massachusetts to Israel Gross Collins (1776-1831) and Mary Ann Knight (c. 1780-c. 1878). His mother died shortly after he was born, and he was raised by his aunts. His father moved to New York City. At age thirteen he left Truro for New Jersey to attend school. He then went to New York City, where his father had him work as an apprentice clerk in the mercantile counting house of McCrea and Slidell. Within a few years Edward moved to the mercantile firm of Delaplaine & Company, at South Street near the East River docks, which was next door to his father's trading and general commission business.
In 1821 Edward joined his father's company, which had shifted from European trade to the Gulf Coast and Caribbean waters. Early in January of 1824 he became a partner in I. G. Collins & Son, which three years later started the first regularly scheduled packet service between New York City and Veracruz, Mexico. In 1826 Edward married Mary Ann Woodruff. She was the daughter of New York City building contractor Thomas T. Woodruff. They had a son, Edward K. Collins II, as well as a daughter and at least one other child. After his father's death in 1831, Edward shifted his business to the booming coastal cotton trade between New Orleans and New York when he bought his first shipping line in 1831. In 1836 he launched the Dramatic Line, a transatlantic carrier whose ships were named after actors. He received a Congressional subsidy in 1847 to form the United States Mail Steamship Company to compete with Britain's Cunard. Though his ships, operated by the Collins Line, proved faster than Cunard's, the subsidy was canceled in 1856 after two of the five ships sank, one carrying Collins's wife and two of his children. He sold the remaining U.S. Mail Steamship Company ships in 1858 and worked in the coal and iron industry in Ohio. Moving to his summer home, "Collinwood," near Wellsville, Ohio, Collins tried iron manufacturing, coal mining, and drilling for oil, but all his efforts failed. He remarried, to Sarah Browne, and by 1862 moved back to New York City where he died in 1878.
[edit] References
- New York Times; January 29, 1878, Wednesday; The will of Edward K. Collins, the founder of the old "Collins Line" of steamers which ran between this port and Liverpool for a number of years, was filed yesterday in the Surrogate's office. It was in an envelope indorsed as follows:
- New York Times; January 18, 1882; A will, dated Oct. 25, 1867, made by Edward K. Collins, was admitted to probate some time ago by Surrogate Calvin. It left all of the decedent's property to his widow.
- New York Times; May 3, 1889, Wednesday; Judge O'Brien of the Supreme Court yesterday handed dawn a decision in favor of Mrs. Sara Jane Collins, widow of Commodore Edward K. Collins, the founder of the famous Collins Line of steamships. Mrs. Collins was sued by Edward K. Collins, one of Commodore Collins's sons, and his executor.
