MOBILE — The second installment of "The Rock Whence I Was Hewn," the family memoir of Sister Marie Emilie, S.N.D. — born Elizabeth Zoe Walsh (1892-1979) — picked up where the first had left off: with her father, Joseph Walsh, having been fetched home from Admiral Farragut’s blockading fleet by a Union sailor bearing a note.
What followed was a story of hard childhoods and long memories, and an origin tale for one of the most familiar place names on the Alabama coast.
Boarding school and a broken father
With her grandfather still a prisoner of war, the memoirist wrote, her grandmother concluded that the safest place for her son was away. Joseph was sent to the Christian Brothers school at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi — the institution known as St. Stanislaus — where he remained for several years.
His father eventually came home an invalid, blind in one eye and unable to work. At 16, Joseph left school and returned to Mobile to support the family. He worked for a time in a cigar shop and did well at it, then moved to the waterfront, where he spent the greater part of his life and, by his daughter’s account, made himself the success that he was.
In due course he met Mary Emily LeBlanc, a young Frenchwoman with dark eyes and dark hair, raised in the French tradition in a small place outside Mobile. They married between 1875 and 1877. Her family, she used to say, did not entirely approve of her marrying an Irishman. Her husband’s version was that she nearly broke her arm tripping over a tree root hurrying to see him, because he was the handsomest man in town.
Back to Bienville
Her mother’s line, the memoirist wrote, was "interesting and romantic," and it ran all the way back to the founding of the colony.
The French had first sent expeditions to Canada, and among the young leaders were the brothers Iberville and Bienville. They explored, made settlements in the era of Marquette and Joliet, and hoped to descend the Mississippi — a plan frustrated by hostile tribes along the route. They returned to France, gathered new ships and new men, and set out to reach the Mississippi from below, by way of the Gulf of Mexico.
Among those who joined them was Louis deBoudan, from whom the memoirist’s mother was descended. He was young, adventurous, and probably born in southern France; the family story placed his upbringing near Marseilles.
The expedition rounded the tip of Florida, entered the Gulf, and came up into Mobile Bay, where Bienville made his settlement. Iberville went on west and up the delta to found what became New Orleans.
Land between Bayou La Batre and Coden
Mobile in those first years sat much farther up the river than it does today; it was later moved down to where the water was more open. Bienville built a rough village of pine huts along the waterfront and parceled out land to his young officers and adventurers.
To Louis deBoudan he gave land along the coast — the stretch, as the memoirist put it for her modern readers, where Bayou La Batre, Mon Louis Island, Coden and Dauphin Island are today.
There deBoudan settled with a servant named Collen, as the name was pronounced in French. He married, probably one of the cassette girls sent from France to be wives to the settlers, and began to raise a family on the coast between Bayou La Batre and Coden.
The island and the name
The forest behind them still held Native peoples who came down to the coast to raid the settlements. On one occasion, with deBoudan away in town, Collen heard that a raiding party was on the march. Feeling the full weight of his responsibility for Madame deBoudan and the children, he loaded them into a pirogue and rowed them to an island off the coast, where he hid them until the danger passed.
The raid did little damage, and a day or two later he brought the family safely back. DeBoudan returned to find them unharmed.
As a reward, he gave Collen the island on which he had sheltered them — and Collen, in honor of his master, named the place Mon Louis Island. DeBoudan also gave him his freedom.
Collen married a French or Native woman and settled there. His descendants, the memoirist wrote, still lived in those parts, many of them speaking a distinctive French and Native patois. The name Collen, over the generations, was anglicized to Collins — a surname that remains common along that stretch of coast to this day.
Other settlers came and mingled their heritage with the original families. But the line held. As the memoirist noted, with something like satisfaction, there are still descendants of the Collen family living in those parts.
The next installment followed deBoudan as he prospered and moved to Mobile.