Appalachian Figures
Willie Raymond “Ray” Collins began life in a Letcher County coal camp and spent it crossing nearly every institution that shaped twentieth century mountain life. He taught in one and two room schools, served in the Army during the Second World War, preached as an Old Regular Baptist elder, bottled Royal Crown Cola and Coca Cola, ran a funeral home on the hill above downtown Whitesburg, and for one term represented his neighbors in the Kentucky House of Representatives.
By the time he died in 1994, Collins had left fingerprints on school boards, church minutes, corporate charters, and even the wooden obituary boards that still stand above town. His story offers a window into how one mountain life could braid faith, business, and politics together in Letcher County.
From Tillie to Carcassonne High School
Collins was born November 5, 1911, at Tillie in Letcher County, the son of George Washington Collins and Mary Jane Brown. Genealogical compilations that trace the Collins and Brown families back through Smoot Creek and Colley Creek identify him as one of a large brood of children, including brothers Russell and Ronald Reed, in a household that straddled coal camp and small farm life.
Family and local tradition remember his mother’s line as descending from John Quincy Brown, often credited as the first schoolteacher in Letcher County. Wikipedia echoes that memory and situates young Willie Raymond in a lineage where the schoolhouse was already a family calling.
Collins attended Carcassonne High School, one of the key rural high schools that served Cane Creek and the communities along the Knott and Letcher border. From there he went on to Morehead State, then a teachers college, preparing for work in public schools. The course was familiar for ambitious young people in the eastern Kentucky mountains during the interwar years. Teacher training offered a path out of manual labor while keeping a person rooted in local communities.
Teacher, soldier, and Old Regular Baptist elder
After college Collins returned to Letcher County classrooms. In an oral history recorded in 2023, his daughter Cordelia Collins Schaber recalls him teaching in small schools dotted across the county, the kind where one or two rooms and a coal stove served every grade. He would leave home early, often traveling rough roads to reach remote hollows, and taught long days before grading papers at the kitchen table.
When the Second World War reached into the mountains, Collins joined the United States Army and served for two years. His service fits a pattern seen across Kentucky, where teachers and other community leaders left rural posts for wartime duty, then returned with broadened horizons and eligibility for veterans programs.
By the time he came home from the Army, Collins had also taken on responsibilities in the Old Regular Baptist church. Association minutes from the 1950s and 1960s identify “Elder Ray Collins” of the Thornton Union Association taking part in business at Sardis and related Old Regular Baptist bodies, giving committee reports and helping tend to associational affairs. The minutes place him squarely within the web of sister churches that tied together congregations from Letcher, Knott, and surrounding counties.
Cordelia’s oral history fills that outline in with family detail. She remembers her father preaching and moderating at several churches, including Thornton Union at Mayking and Little Colly, and spending many weekends traveling to funerals, baptizings, and association meetings. It was common, she notes, for families to plan their social calendar around his preaching appointments.
In that pattern we see a familiar mountain rhythm. The same man who held a chalkboard in a one room school might chair a church meeting on Saturday and Sunday, then on Monday morning be back teaching arithmetic to children whose parents he had baptized.
Bottling RC and backing a screaming newspaper
Collins’s path took a sharp turn when he left full time teaching for the soft drink business. The family oral history and local newspaper features agree that he went to work in bottling, first handling clerical duties at a Coca Cola operation, then moving into Royal Crown Cola.
A Mountain Eagle feature on the history of the Royal Crown plant at Whitesburg recalls how Bradley Bentley and “Ray Collins” acquired the local RC franchise after the Second World War and turned it into a thriving business. The story identifies Collins not only as a businessman but as an Old Regular Baptist preacher, bridging what might seem like separate worlds in town.
Legal records show how far the bottling ventures reached. In a 1970 opinion of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, dealing with a dispute over the Hazard Coca Cola Bottling Works, the judges note that in August 1965 all of Hazard’s assets, except real estate, were sold to “one Raymond Collins,” who then resold the operation to G. D. Polly within a year. Business directories and corporate filings list W. Raymond Collins among the officers or incorporators for entities including Coca Cola Bottling Co. of Hazard and Joe Ray Coal Company, as well as a corporation tied to the Thornton Union Association of Old Regular Baptists.
The best glimpse of what those business ventures meant for community life comes from a national journalism award booklet honoring Tom and Pat Gish of The Mountain Eagle. In a long essay about the Gishes’ battles over strip mining and coal politics, Tom Gish pauses to describe the financial peril his paper faced when a major electric utility and local coal interests leaned on advertisers to pull out. In the middle of that storm, he writes, one loyal advertiser stood firm: Ray Collins, an Old Regular Baptist minister who made his living bottling Royal Crown Cola. For roughly a decade Collins bought a full page advertisement in every issue, enough, Gish says, to keep newsprint paid for and the paper alive, and his RC plant rose to a top ranking in per capita sales.
That single paragraph tells us as much about Collins as a dozen corporate records. It shows a conservative mountain preacher backing a fiercely independent weekly that was being labeled “communist” by powerful interests. It also reminds us that in small town Appalachia, advertising buys can be a kind of political act, especially when others are pulling their money.
Ray Collins Funeral Home and the boards on the hill
In the mid 1960s Collins bought a different kind of business: the old Kraft Funeral Home in Whitesburg. Cordelia recalls the family moving their life up the hill above town when he took over the enterprise, which they renamed Ray Collins Funeral Home.
Kentucky corporate records show Ray Collins Funeral Home, Inc., organized in March 1968, with W. Raymond Collins and his wife Estelle listed among the incorporators and with a Madison Street address in Whitesburg. The charter situates the funeral home in the same neighborhood as the courthouse and courthouse square, along what locals often call “the hill” above the main business district.
Over the years, obituaries in regional papers and funeral notices archived on genealogical sites routinely mention services “in the Ray Collins Funeral Home Chapel” or arrangements “under the direction of Ray Collins Funeral Home.” Even after the business passed out of Collins family hands, the name lived on in printed death notices, a sort of lingering imprint of the man who had once run it.
Another Mountain Eagle feature explains how Whitesburg came to have the wooden obituary boards that still stand outside its funeral homes. The article credits “Ray Collins,” then operator of the Collins funeral home, with starting the practice of posting death notices on outdoor boards so passersby on Main Street could learn of local deaths at a glance. Anyone who has driven through town and seen people reading those boards has witnessed a small piece of Collins’s legacy.
The boards fit his larger pattern. They combined practical business sense with a preacher’s understanding that death is both family event and public news in mountain communities. In a place where not everyone took the paper and telephone service could be spotty, a hand lettered board on the hill was an efficient way to spread word and invite mourners.
Politics, schools, and the Jenkins Clinic Hospital
Collins did not confine his work to pulpits and businesses. He also stepped into electoral politics. Running as a Republican, he sought a seat in the Kentucky Senate in 1967 but lost. Two years later, he won election to the Kentucky House of Representatives from the 91st District, defeating Democratic incumbent Enoch O. Holbrook.
He took office on January 1, 1970, and served a single term that ended at the start of 1972. Louisville’s Courier Journal summarized the 1967 and 1969 legislative races that framed his brief tenure, listing his name among the mountain Republicans who found openings in a shifting party landscape.
Closer to home, Mountain Eagle “Way We Were” columns remember Collins as a member and vice chair of the Letcher County Board of Education, and as a community leader who helped organize efforts to keep a proposed college campus in Letcher County rather than seeing it placed in Hazard. Those snippets, drawn from old news items and meeting reports, show him in the thick of local fights over schooling and economic development.
His name also appears in the records of the Jenkins Clinic Hospital Foundation. A 1988 decision by the federal Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a case over the tax status of the foundation, lists W. Raymond Collins among the defendants, underscoring his later role on that hospital board. That service connects his story to the long, difficult history of medical care in the coal camp towns of Letcher County.
Taken together, those public roles put Collins at the intersection of schools, health care, and higher education at a time when eastern Kentucky was wrestling with deindustrialization and the War on Poverty. He was not the only local figure bridging those worlds, but the record shows him consistently stepping into that kind of work.
Family memory and the shape of a life
On July 26, 1994, Collins died in Lexington at age eighty two, after suffering a stroke. A death list in the Letcher County Community News Press later that year recorded the basic facts known to his neighbors: born November 5, 1911, died July 26, 1994. Obituaries in The Mountain Eagle and the Lexington Herald Leader described him as a retired teacher, Old Regular Baptist minister, businessman, and former state representative, tying together the threads of his working life.
FamilySearch and related genealogical records give his full name as Willie Raymond Collins, list his wife as Estelle, and place his burial in Kentucky, with references to a gravestone photograph and funeral records. The same family trees link him back to the Collins and Brown lines of Tillie, reminding modern readers that behind the public offices and corporate titles stood a man firmly rooted in a particular set of kin.
The most vivid picture, though, comes from Cordelia Collins Schaber’s thirty page oral history, recorded as part of the Carr Creek project and preserved in the NOAA Voices collection. She remembers her father running the funeral home and RC operations while still preaching at Old Regular Baptist churches, keeping Bibles and business ledgers in the same office, and measuring decisions against both profit and conscience.
She also remembers him as a mountain father surrounded by daughters, as a man who had seen war and harsh work yet still made time for storytelling and song, and as someone who held a steady belief that education and church life could lift up a community without erasing its character. Taken alongside the paper trail, her memories help round out the picture of Ray Collins as more than a list of dates.
In the end, Collins was a figure of his place and time. His businesses sold Coca Cola and RC Cola to miners and housewives. His funeral home tended the dead whose names still appear on wooden boards over the town. His sermons helped shape Old Regular Baptist worship for decades. His votes in Frankfort and on local boards pulled Letcher County a little further into the modern Commonwealth. Together those pieces form one mountain life that, in touching so many institutions at once, tells us something about how Letcher County itself changed in the twentieth century.
Sources and further reading
NOAA Voices: Carr Creek Oral History Project, interview with Cordelia Collins Schaber, February 17, 2023. Detailed family narrative of Willie Raymond “Ray” Collins’s life as teacher, soldier, bottler, funeral director, and Old Regular Baptist minister, including his role at Thornton Union and other churches. Voices Oral History Archives+1
Raymond Collins (Kentucky politician), Wikipedia. Concise biographical entry summarizing Collins’s birth at Tillie, education at Carcassonne High School and Morehead State, teaching career, World War II service, 1967 Senate race, 1969 election to the Kentucky House from the 91st District, and death in 1994, with citations to contemporary newspapers. Wikipedia
“W. Raymond Collins dies,” The Mountain Eagle, August 3, 1994, page 1, and “W. Raymond Collins, retired teacher, dies,” Lexington Herald Leader, July 29, 1994. Obituaries identifying Collins as a former state representative, retired teacher, Old Regular Baptist minister, and local businessman. Newspapers.com+1
Letcher County Community News Press, December 28, 1994, page 5. Death list entry giving Collins’s birth and death dates and confirming local recognition in Letcher County. St. Paul Archive
“RC plant was Bradley Bentley’s since ’47,” The Mountain Eagle, November 9, 2011. Local history feature on the Royal Crown bottling plant at Whitesburg that notes Bradley Bentley’s partnership with Ray Collins and identifies Collins as an Old Regular Baptist preacher and businessman. The Mountain Eagle+1
“Funeral home boards are tradition here,” The Mountain Eagle, January 13, 2016. Story on the wooden obituary boards outside Whitesburg funeral homes that credits Ray Collins with starting the practice at his funeral home on the hill. The Mountain Eagle
Ben Gish and colleagues, “Happy news not a staple of this newspaper,” in Grassroots Editor, Summer 2010, Golden Quill / Golden Dozen booklet. Essay honoring Tom and Pat Gish of The Mountain Eagle, including an account of Ray Collins as an Old Regular Baptist minister and RC bottler who kept buying a full page ad every week for about ten years, effectively keeping the paper operating during advertiser boycotts. Blox Images+1
Coca Cola Bottling Works (Thomas) Inc. v. Hazard Coca Cola Bottling Works, Inc., 450 S.W.2d 515 (Ky. Ct. App. 1970). Kentucky Court of Appeals opinion noting that in August 1965 Hazard Coca Cola sold all of its assets, except real estate, to “one Raymond Collins,” who resold the business to G. D. Polly within a year. Justia Law
Kentucky Secretary of State records as summarized in B2BHint corporate listings. Entries for Ray Collins Funeral Home, Inc. (incorporated March 25, 1968, at 315 Madison Street, Whitesburg), and for other corporations such as Coca Cola Bottling Co. of Hazard, Joe Ray Coal Company, and the Thornton Union Association of Old Regular Baptists that list W. Raymond Collins as an officer or incorporator. B2BHint
Minutes of the Sardis, Thornton Union, and Northern New Salem associations of Old Regular Baptists. Mid twentieth century associational minutes that list Elder Ray Collins of Thornton Union in committee reports and delegation lists, documenting his wider standing among Old Regular Baptist churches beyond Letcher County. Northern News Salem+2Information Place+2
In re Jenkins Clinic Hospital Foundation, Inc., 861 F.2d 720 (6th Cir. 1988). Federal appellate decision involving the Jenkins Clinic Hospital Foundation that lists W. Raymond Collins among the defendants, corroborating his later service on the hospital’s governing board. Law Resource
FamilySearch, “Willie Raymond Collins (1911–1994),” and the blog “(Partial) Descendants of Samuel Collins, Volume 3.” Genealogical sources that compile Collins family data, including Willie Raymond’s birth at Tillie on November 5, 1911, his parents George Washington Collins and Mary Jane Brown, his marriage to Estelle, and his placement among the Collins and Brown descendants of Letcher County. FamilySearch+1
Mountain Eagle “The Way We Were” columns. Retrospective pieces that recall Ray Collins as a Letcher County Board of Education member and vice chair and as a local leader involved in efforts to keep a college campus in Letcher County, adding texture to his political and civic work beyond Frankfort. The Mountain Eagle+1