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Collins Hotel

The Collins Hotel was a early Pensacola hotel in operation during the antebellum period in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The proprietor was Antoine Collins and his wife Mary Pyburn Collins. According to one Pensacola resident, the hotel's name was the St. Mary Hotel. [1]


The hotel was in operation by 1829, as accounts of a ball in honor of George Washington's Birthday were reported in social news in South Carolina and Philadelphia.[2]

In February 1841, the hotel was burned down by fire. The hotel burned again in 1852, but was rebuilt by 1858.[3] [4]

The Collins' lost the hotel during the Civil War.[5]

  1. [Pensacola Journal, April 2nd, 1905, Second Section, in an article by I. E. Allen http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87062268/1905-04-02/ed-1/seq-9/;words=Pyburn+Marie+Marys?date1=1836&date2=1922&searchType=advanced&lccn=sn87062268&proxdistance=5&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=&phrasetext=&andtext=mary+pyburn&dateFilterType=yearRange&index=1]
  2. [National Gazette, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 22, 1827 and Charleston Courier, Charleston, South Carolina, March 29, 1827]
  3. [New Bedford Register, New Bedford, Massachusetts, March 10, 1841, also in the Times Picayune, New Orleans, Louisiana, February 25, 1841, and several others in 1841. Daily National Intelligencer, Washington, D.C., October 28, 1852, picked up from the Mobile Advertiser on October 19th.]
  4. [Times Picayune, New Orleans, July 29, 1858 mentions a man leaping out of a window at the Collins Hotel]
  5. New Orleans Times, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 29, 1865 "Antoine Collins, aged about 80 years, committed suicide in Philadelphia by jumping from a third story window of the United States hotel. Deceased was a proprietor of a large hotel in Pensacola, Fla and during the war lost all his property. He had recently been subject to fits of temporary derangement."