Jennie Collins Austin - 1764 - 1849

Jennie Collins Austin 

Jennie Collins was born June 23, 1764 and was the daughter of Thomas Collins (1729-1796) and Rosanna Dodd Collins (1728-1798), in the area that would later be called Spartanburg District of South Carolina.

After the battle of Musgrove's Mill, Jennie's Patriot brother, Captain John Collins, had taken British prisoners to North Carolina, where he joined General Daniel Morgan, encamped at Grindal Shoals. Desperately in need of fresh troops, General Morgan sent Captain Collins home to recruit men for the Patriot cause.  Capt Collins was able to enlist fifty men.  It was extremely necessary for him to communicate with General Morgan as to when and where he should join him with the fresh troops.  Captain Collins remembered that his young sister, Jennie, had been a superb horsewoman since the age of twelve. Relying on the courage and intelligence of his sixteen-year-old sister, Jennie, Captain Collins' reports were sewed in the lining of her saddle bags and she rode away to the camp of General Morgan.    

James W. Austin, in his publication "Austin and Allied Families," stated, "About January 11, 1781, mounted on a fleet horse, the young girl sped away alone on her forty-mile ride.  She faced the icy winds of the January cold.  She had to swim her horse over two rivers .  She ran an imminent risk of capture at the hands of the British and Tories whose cruelties at this stage of the war were frightful. "Tories had murdered defenseless Patriot women in cold blood, and the cruel British General, Tarleton, had executed prisoners of war.  "Jennie" narrowly escaped a collision with Tarleton's troops, for his forces, moving to attack General Morgan, crossed the path she had ridden over the day after she had passed.  But regardless of her peril, the brave girl found the camp of the Patriot Army and delivered her dispatches to the astonished commander."

"Jennie Collins tarried in the Patriot camp long enough to render a service to General Daniel Morgan which that gallant officer gratefully acknowledged.  She washed the General's shirts and left him the clean linen which he wore a few days later in the battle of Cowpens.  Then with General Morgan's orders to her brother, Captain John Collins, concealed in her saddle, Jennie galloped back over the lonely trails, again swam her horse through the icy waters, and safely rejoined her soldier brother at his camp, after a gallant gallop of eighty miles." 

Perhaps on one of her rides to deliver secret information to her brother, Captain John Collins, who participated in most of the battles of South Carolina, Jennie met William Austin, who by then would have been at least twenty, born in Virginia, March 27, 1759.  Jennie was approximately sixteen at the time her first exciting role in the Revolutionary War took place, just prior to the battle of Cowpens (January 17, 1781). 

In spite of war and the objections of Jennie's father who was of Scottish descent, love found a way. William Austin, of English lineage, courted Jennie and plotted how he could elope with her.  Young William had a chum who was on good terms with William Collins.  William Austin conceived the idea of having his friend borrow Collins' dog and gun to go hunting with Jennie's father.  Descendant Charles Wesley Austin wrote his brother George in Oxnard, CA on October 10, 1911, "While they (the hunters) were away, William Austin took Jennie on his horse behind him and they took their everlasting elopement to the nearest parson (January 12, 1783).  And they lived happily ever after."  

Jennie Collins Austin was my ancestral great aunt through her marriage to my uncle William Austin, son of my 6th great grandfather, Capt Nathaniel Austin.  

Glider III, built by William and Jennie Collins Austin