How Maude Collins became Ohio’s first female sheriff in Vinton County

Maude Collins became part of Vinton County history through a tragedy that still anchors the county’s public memory. At the Vinton County Courthouse in McArthur, the marker beside the sheriff’s office points back to October 1925, when a young widow with five children stepped into a job no Ohio woman had held before and turned a local loss into a statewide milestone.

A tragedy that changed Vinton County

Fletcher Collins was 39 when he was shot and killed while attempting to serve warrants in October 1925. He was working in the rough law-enforcement world of southern Ohio when the attack happened in a field between Coalton and Jackson, where he located a man and another wanted man before being warned not to come any closer. As he crossed a fence, the suspect opened fire with a shotgun.

The human scale of the loss was visible immediately in Vinton County. Fletcher’s funeral procession included more than 250 automobiles stretching nearly a mile from the jail in McArthur to Hamden, where another 50 cars were already waiting. Maude Collins, then a jail matron and the mother of five, was left to carry that grief into the next phase of her life.

How Maude Collins took the office

Vinton County Commissioners appointed Maude Collins sheriff on October 9, 1925, to fill the vacancy left by her husband’s death. She was elected in 1926 and became Ohio’s first female sheriff. That distinction is the headline fact, but the deeper story is that she did not occupy the office as a placeholder. She worked the job, handled prisoners, and met the demands of a county still defined by hard rural policing and public order concerns.

Her career moved beyond symbolism into daily enforcement. Later accounts describe her breaking up moonshine stills, transporting prisoners, and investigating homicides. She was also said to be the first woman to ever deliver prisoners to the state penitentiary, a detail that captures how visibly she pushed past the expectations of her era.

One of the clearest examples of her detective work came in a double-homicide case involving misleading footprints and swapped shoes. That kind of detail matters in Vinton County because it shows Collins not as a ceremonial first, but as a law officer doing real investigative work in an age when few women were allowed to be seen in that role at all.

The record needed correcting

For years, Maude Collins’s place in state history was misunderstood. When the Vinton County Historical and Genealogical Society learned that a woman elected sheriff in 1976 had been mistakenly recognized as Ohio’s first female sheriff, the group moved to correct the record. It nominated Maude Collins for the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame to restore her place in the history books.

That effort reached a public milestone on October 24, 2000, when Maude Collins’s granddaughter traveled from California to accept the recognition on her behalf. The family’s presence gave the correction a local face and tied the county’s memory work directly to the people who still carry her story.

Maude’s legacy extends beyond the sheriff’s office. She was later elected Vinton County clerk of courts, extending her public service into another county office and showing that her career was not a one-term anomaly. She died in 1972 at age 78 and is later said to have been buried with Fletcher Collins in Hamden Cemetery, where the story comes full circle from the 1925 funeral route back to the county town tied to her family name.

Where to see Maude Collins in Vinton County

The most direct place to connect with Maude Collins today is the Vinton County Courthouse in McArthur. Her Ohio Historical Marker was erected beside the courthouse in 2019, putting her story in the county’s civic center rather than hiding it in an archive. The marker gives visitors a fast, physical reminder that one of Ohio’s most important law-enforcement firsts belongs to Vinton County.

A second landmark arrived in 2025. A Maude Collins mural was dedicated on October 9, 2025, marking the 100th anniversary of her swearing-in. Discover Vinton County says the mural is on the west side of the Vinton County Courthouse at 100 E. Main St. in McArthur, and it was painted by Pamela Kellough. The Vinton County Department of Tourism partnered on the project, and Vinton County National Bank contributed $6,000 toward the mural effort.

Together, the marker and mural turn downtown McArthur into a small but meaningful heritage stop. They sit within walking distance of the courthouse square, where the county’s public identity is most visible, and they keep Maude’s name in circulation in the same place where her authority once mattered.

Why her story still belongs to the county

Maude Collins matters in Vinton County because her story is local in the strongest possible way. It moves from a jail in McArthur to a cemetery in Hamden, from a 1925 killing between Coalton and Jackson to a courthouse wall in the county seat, and from a family tragedy to a statewide correction of the historical record. Few county figures have left that many visible traces across the landscape.

Her birth year is given as 1893 in some accounts, with some sources listing 1894, and her death in 1972 at age 78 closes the timeline with the same sense of place that defines the rest of her life. The reason she still stands out is not only that she was first, but that she became first in a county that can still point to the courthouse, the marker, the mural, and the cemetery and say exactly where that history happened.