Bertie Shaw Rollins Collection

William Mansfield Shaw, son of Major Joseph Shaw and Nancy Dent Shaw was born on February 16, 1812 in Danville, Virginia. He later moved with his family to Putnam, Tennessee where he met his wife Angeline Boyd Butler in 1841. In late 1842 they moved to Monroe County, Mississippi in the Faust Shop district (Darracott). Together they had the following children: Anna Elizabeth (Sept. 29, 1843), Martha Jane (March 7, 1845), Mary Luticia (May 26, 1846), William Henry Clay (Sept. 18, 1848), Charles Wilder (July 30,1850), Virginia Tennessee (July 13, 1852), John Preston (June 19, 1854), James Bolivar Shaw (March 1, 1856), Jacob Franklin (Sept. 26,1858), Arthur Mansfield (Nov. 20, 1860), Emily Louisa Angeline (Oct. 28, 1862), Obadiah Charlton (Dec. 15, 1864).

In Monroe County the Shaws owned/operated a 680 acre farm. In addition to farming, William was a builder and constructed the walls and roof of the James Creek Bridge. He was also a Civil Official. Between 1867-1869 William M. Shaw served as Justice of the Peace for the ninth district of Monroe County. In 1869 he was employed as a deputy sheriff. As a farmer he was a member of the Lebanon Grange No. 558. Until the end of the 1870s he employed the help of his sons to operate his farm. By 1880 William had rented, leased, or sold the majority of his land, retaining only 300 acres for himself.

In the same year four of his sons were operating their own farms. Charley rented 60 acres of improved land while his younger brother Arthur sharecropped 25 acres. Another of William M. Shaw's sons, John Preston, rented 14 improved acres but devoted a great deal of his time inventing farm machinery. John patented several inventions but derived little money from any of them. Poor financial and emotional conditions led him twice to the mental asylum and eventually to his suicide. John Preston Shaw died in 1901.

The most financially successful of William M. Shaw's sons was his eldest son William Henry Clay Shaw. Five years after his marriage in 1875 to Ella Green Bullock he was operating a farm of 115 improved acres and 1100 acres of forest and woodlands valued at $7,000. In 1890 he purchased a grocery store. In 1886 Henry's sister Virginia married Ella Green Bullock's brother Edmund Lewis Bullock. Together they had four children. Edmund L. Bullock died suddenly in 1889 after a brief illness of congestion.

Anna Elizabeth Shaw and Mollie Shaw remained at home caring for their parents and traveling regularly to eastern Tennessee to visit maternal family members.

Bertie Shaw Rollins, historian, daughter of Martha Thompson Shaw and James Bolivar Shaw, was born on October 21, 1904 in Monroe County, Mississippi. She married Roy Rollins and had one child, Grady Lawrence. She died in 1996 in Aberdeen, MS.

Sources: United States Census - 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880; United States Agricultural and Mechanical Census - 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880; John Rodabough Papers - files 19,49; Rowland, Dunbar Military History of Mississippi 1803-1898; The Official and Statistical Register of the State of Mississippi 1908; Historical Sketches of Aberdeen, Mississippi; Mother Monroe; Journal of Monroe County History; Allie Everhart Miller Cemetery Records