A Thrilling Romance of the Civil War: The History of Mrs. Mollie E. Williams Written by Herself: Forty-two Days in Search of a Missing Husband

A Thrilling Romance of the Civil War: The History of Mrs. Mollie E. Williams Written by Herself: Forty-two Days in Search of a Missing Husband, with a further description of “A Lesson of Woman’s Fidelity, Fortitude and Affection,” by Mollie E. Williams is a personal account of the author’s adventures during the Civil War and her life after. The first forty-seven pages of the ninety-eight-page book are devoted to the war years, with the rest devoted to family and personal life after the war. The book was written around 1901 and published in 1902.

Mollie Elizabeth Brumley was born on September 10, 1847, in Monroe County, Mississippi, the only child of Hiram and Lavicia Brumley. When Mollie was very young, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. Orphaned at age eleven, she came to Arkansas to live with her aunt and uncle, Usley and Jim Greenhaw, in Searcy County. She was thirteen years old when the Civil War began and just shy of eighteen when it ended.

The setting of the book is Richland, a small, fertile valley in the hilly Ozark region of northwestern Arkansas. In 1860, the valley held a population of 388 white people and one enslaved Black person spread across about sixty farms. Mollie lived on the Greenhaw farm with her aunt and uncle and their eight children. The Greenhaw family came to support the Confederate cause, with all four sons entering the Confederate army in 1861–1862. During the war, Searcy County, along with other northwestern Arkansas counties, suffered devastation from incessant guerrilla fighting. Two skirmishes between rebel guerrillas and Union scouts or foraging parties erupted in the Richland Valley, one within sight of the Greenhaw home.

In May 1862, Mollie Brumley was betrothed to Valentine Williams, who was mustering into the Confederate army. The following year, her fiancé was reported missing in battle. A few months later, Mollie married another Confederate soldier of Richland, Henry Cole, becoming Mollie E. Cole and taking up residence with her mother-in-law Sabina Cole and the four youngest Cole children. Mollie traveled to Batesville (Independence County) at one time to visit her husband in camp, doing a short turn as an army laundress.

Henry Cole deserted the regular army to join Captain James H. Love’s guerrilla company, which fought mostly in and around Searcy County from the fall of 1863 to the end of the war. Mollie once rescued her husband after he was wounded in a skirmish, and twice she hid out with him in caves for several days. She was involved alongside her husband in more skirmishing in Richland in May 1864. Her husband’s guerrilla activities made the Cole family a target of a certain Unionist guerrilla band, which burned them out of their house in March 1865. At war’s end, a member of this band murdered Henry Cole and threw his body into the Arkansas River. Mollie spent weeks (the “forty-two days” in the title) on a fruitless errand to recover the body.

After the war, Mollie’s former fiancé, whom she had presumed dead, returned to Richland, and the two married. The second half of the book relates the story of their unexpected reunion; their courtship and marriage; their raising a big family; and other life changes through the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Mollie E. Williams died on February 25, 1934, in Cleveland, Oklahoma.

The book is a rare personal account of the Civil War in Arkansas as experienced by a female resident of the Ozarks and gives evidence of the disastrous effects of the guerrilla war on civilians.

A facsimile reprint of the 1902 book appeared in 1992. The original book exists today in only a handful of library collections.

For additional information:
Catton, Theodore. Life, Leisure and Hardship along the Buffalo: Historic Resources Study, Buffalo National River. Omaha, NE: Midwest Region, National Park Service, 2008.

———. Mollie Brumley’s Civil War: Surviving the Guerrilla War in Arkansas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2026.

Johnston, James J. Searcy County Ancestor Information Exchange (periodical), Fayetteville, AR: J. J. Johnston, 1991–2016.

Williams, Mollie E. A Thrilling Romance of the Civil War: The History of Mrs. Mollie E. Williams Written by Herself: Forty-Two Days in Search of a Missing Husband. Chicago, IL: 1902. Online at https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/viewer/405544/ (accessed February 26, 2026).

Ted R. Catton
University of Montana