Mahala mullins family tree

Mahala mullins moonshiner
Mahala mullins apple brandy recipe
Mahala mullins photos

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Some say moonshiner Mahalia Collins Mullins once beat 30 men in a wrestling match and sold them all whisky afterward. Others say she was so large that when police tried to arrest her, they couldn’t get her through the door. By the time Mullins passed away, her story was known from coast to coast, and into Canada and Mexico. The headlines? “Not too Big for Death.” “Famous Moonshiner Dead, Defied Law Officers from a Mountain Top.”

In East Tennessee, legendary moonshiners like Popcorn Sutton loom large in the imagination, rebellious and wild, driving fast and shooting faster, and almost always white and male. But Mullins was different. As with many old stories, much of Mullins’s origins are shrouded in legend, and for every one story about her life, there are two more.

During her life, her public image was constructed by muckraking journalists and missionaries. One early interviewer, missionary C.H. Humble, decried her business as a “curse brought to her own door.” Another, journalist Paul Converse, made special note of what he saw as the feuding and lawlessness that surrounded

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Mahala "Big Haley" Collins

When Mahala "Big Haley" Collins was born on 30 March 1824, in Hancock, Tennessee, United States, her father, Solomon Dickerson Collins, was 29 and her mother, Virginia Jane "Gincy" Goins, was 31. She married John Mullins Sr. in 1840. They were the parents of at least 11 sons and 6 daughters. She lived in Civil District 11, Hancock, Tennessee, United States in 1880 and District 3, Grainger, Tennessee, United States in 1880. She died on 10 September 1898, in Hancock, Tennessee, United States, at the age of 74, and was buried in Vardy, Hancock, Tennessee, United States.

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Cabin of Moonshiner (Too Large To Get Out Of Bed)

Mahala Mullins died in a bed similar to this one. The real one was boarded up and turned into her coffin.

Vardy, Tennessee

"Up yonder is where it come from," said Avery Newbury of the Vardy Historical Society, talking about the Mahala Mullins Cabin, which now stands next to Black Water Road. Jack Mullins, who traces his Mullins ancestry back a dozen generations, pointed across Vardy Valley to a distant spot atop Newman's Ridge. "I always wondered how they got it up there," said Jack of the cabin, built around 1855 and occupied for a hundred years by members of the Mullins family. "It had got in real bad shape. We hauled it here piece by piece on a big ten-wheeler."

Jack Mullins points to the cabin's former spot on Newman's Ridge.

The Historical Society took possession of the log cabin in 2000, restored it, and moved it into Vardy Valley where it could be visited by the public. "Where it was located, it was never gonna work out," said Jack. "Unless you could walk a long way and get up that ridge."

Newspapers said she was