Among the many notable Williamsport women who should be publicly remembered is Julia C. Collins, a nineteenth-century African American schoolteacher and author. One way of honoring her was to nominate her for a Pennsylvania Historical Marker; the application, submitted by the Lycoming County Historical Society, was approved in April 2009. This marker will be the first one in Lycoming County to honor a woman. Collins was the author of The Curse of Caste; or the Slave Bride (1865), one of the first novels ever written by a black American woman. The serialized novel, along with six non fiction essays by Collins, was published in The Christian Recorder, the weekly newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Since The Recorder had a national distribution and a large African American readership, we can assume that Collins’ writing touched many thousands of people all across the United States. In 2006, Oxford University Press republished the novel and essays in a book edited by William L. Anderson and Mitch Kachun. Dr. Kachun, a professor of history at Western Michigan University, spent considerable time in Williamsport researching Julia Collins and spoke at the Lycoming County Historical Society.

Julia Collins left few traces in the historical record, but it is clear that Williamsport was her primary residence, at least between April 1864 and her death in November 1865. It is almost certain that The Curse of Caste was written in Williamsport. In April 1864 there was an announcement in The Recorder that Mrs. Julia C. Collins would reopen the black children’s term of public school on April 11. Since Williamsport’s formal school system did not provide facilities for African American education until the early 1870s, Collins may have been hired and compensated by the school board, but she would have made her own arrangements to rent space and purchase supplies. The lack of documentation on Julia Collins is typical for nineteenth-century women, particularly black women, according to Kachun. We do not know where she was born, whether she was born a slave or free, where she was educated, or even her birth name, since Collins was the name of her husband, Stephen Collins, a barber on West Fourth Street. From letters we know that she had at least two children, but everything else about them is uncertain including their names, ages, and sexes. We do not know where she is buried, although some members of her extended family are buried in Wildwood Cemetery. The marker will be erected along the new River Walk in Williamsport, which is near that area of the city where Julia Collins most likely lived and taught. Dedication is set for June 19, as part of the Juneteenth celebration.

The main characters in The Curse of Caste are Richard Tracy, the son a Col. Tracy, a New Orleans slave owner; Lina, the woman he falls in love with; and their daughter, Claire Neville. “Richard, after passing a successful collegiate course and graduating with honor, was on his return home, down the noble Mississippi on board the beautiful Alhambra, when he formed the acquaintance of a party of fellow travelers, one of who deeply interested him. The party consisted of two young ladies and a gentleman, who registered their names as Hartly. The gentleman was the brother of one of the ladies, while the other lady seemed only a distant relative.” Richard falls in love with the “other lady,” named Lina. Here is how Collins describes her: “Lina was as beautiful as the fancied image of a poet’s dream, a form of medium size, with dark flashing eyes and a profusion of curling black hair which defied all efforts on her part to keep in bands or braids, but would naturally fall in graceful ringlets about her neck and shoulders. One singular feature in Lina’s beauty was her dark, rich-looking complexion; she was not a brunette, but hers was that dark brownish skin, which we observe in the Spaniard and half-breed Indians, which combined with features of striking regularity, rendered Lina, as she indeed was, a singularly attractive young lady.” However, a few weeks later, Col. Tracy visits the Hartly residence and, not knowing about his son Richard’s new love, Lina, tells his family: “I attended a sale of slaves, the property of old Hartly, who resides about fifty miles up the river and was formerly a man of considerable wealth, but being of a wild, reckless disposition, has in a few years squandered his fortune, and degenerated into a con firmed drunkard and gambler. I purchased several plantation and house servants among who is a beautiful quadroon, who is the daughter of old Hartly, I understand, and has been educated at a Catholic school in Canada, and believed herself his lawful child. The young girl is beautiful, and I think well educated. Her distress was really affecting and out of pity for the young thing, I bought her with the lot, but what I am to do with the baggage I cannot conceive for slaves educated at the North are not just the thing to be introduced into a southern household. So, I guess I will sell this bit of humanity at the first offer. Why she had the audacity to faint when by accident she learned the name of her future master was Col. Tracy. I must say, although I claim to be a kind and indulgent master, I have no use for this sensitive class of negroes.” The scene is set to know The Curse of Caste, and the trials and tribulations of Lina, “the Slave Bride.”