![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/annhollins.jpg\" "\\"Ann")
Ann Hollins wasn\u2019t keen on having her name attached to a college. After all, as her obituary would note a few years later, she was a woman known for her \u201cliberality without ostentation.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the Hollins trustees insisted this was the most appropriate way to recognize 60-year-old Ann Hollins and her husband, John, whom she had just talked into giving $5,000 to the Female Seminary at Botetourt Springs. The year was 1855. That gift\u2014worth around $139,000 in current dollars\u2014was the first large gift the school of approximately 123 young female students had ever received, and it probably kept the constantly financially strapped institution from going under. Acting on their gratitude, the trustees also offered John a seat on the board, which he accepted and held until his death in 1859.<\/p>\n
While it was Ann who persuaded John to give the women\u2019s school the first $5,000, and an additional $12,500 over their lifetimes, it undoubtedly was the school\u2019s founder, Charles Lewis Cocke, who tapped his friends first and cultivated their interest. Cocke\u2019s and Ann\u2019s families had been associated with each other for years through Baptist church work in Eastern Virginia, where both were from.<\/p>\n
Ann Halsey married John Hollins in 1811 in Richmond, and they moved to Lynchburg in 1817. In Lynchburg, John quickly became a wealthy and influential landowner, businessman, miller, grocer, and city liquor inspector. Ann became an active charter member of the First Lynchburg Baptist Church. She was the first president of the church\u2019s Ladies Aid Society, serving until 1864. She also persuaded John to give generously to her church, although he never joined.<\/p>\n
The History of the First Baptist Church of Lynchburg<\/i> states: \u201cTo the question \u2018What induces you to help the church so much if you do not love the Savior?\u2019 John replied, \u2018I suppose it must be to please my wife.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to receiving gifts from Ann and John, evidence suggests the trustees also borrowed from the couple on occasion. In the university archives are two promissory notes to repay John Hollins signed by Hollins Institute trustee George P. Tayloe, dated November 12, 1857, for the amount of $623.78, and November 29, 1857, for $1,826.22. No record could be found to indicate whether the loans were repaid before John\u2019s death on April 7, 1859.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/johnhollins.jpg\" "\\"John")
Although quite wealthy at the time of John\u2019s death, neither John nor Ann left money to Hollins in their wills. John left \u201cmy manufacturing mill called the Blackwater Mill\u201d to Ann when he died on the eve of the Civil War. Ann lost most of her fortune, a reported $140,000 in invested funds, in the war. When she died, in 1866, she bequeathed the portraits of herself and John that had hung in her parlor to Hollins Institute, as the trustees had wanted her to do.<\/p>\n
With the passing of Ann and John Hollins, Charles Cocke lost not only old and dear friends, but also generous donors (he once said Ann would have given more had she not lost her fortune in the war) and supporters who believed in his mission to educate women. Of course, whether John was as passionate about the mission as his wife and Cocke were is not known. It may be that he gave to Cocke\u2019s institution for the same reason he supported the Baptist church: to please his wife. Regardless, the fact that he so generously backed his wife\u2019s interests says as much about his character as it does about hers.<\/p>\n
No, they didn\u2019t found Hollins, as people unfamiliar with our history often assume. But they found a reason to keep it alive during those tenuous early years. And while Ann Hollins never had children of her own, every woman who has ever attended Hollins Institute, Hollins College, and Hollins University can rightly call her Mother Hollins.<\/p>\n
Brenda McDaniel <\/b>HON \u201912<\/b> served as Hollins\u2019 executive director of donor relations before her retirement in 2013. Thanks to Beth Harris, special collections and government information librarian. The portraits of Ann and John Hollins hang in the Green Drawing Room in Main.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ann Hollins took an early interest in the Female Seminary at Botetourt Springs, and the generosity she and her husband, John, showed the struggling school changed its name and its future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5632,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[56],"class_list":["post-5478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-summer-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5478"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5722,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5478\/revisions\/5722"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}