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Southern Tier Life // ISSUE 06
Cameron Collins
“I’ve always been amazed at the amount of talent Elmira has produced!” Cameron Collins, 50, formerly of Elmira, says. “There’s no place with a 28,000 population that is pumping out talent like Elmira. It’s incredible.” Cameron Collins currently lives, works and writes in St. Louis, MO, but he’ll always consider himself an upstate New Yorker. He grew up on Logan Street and attended Booth School, Ernie Davis Middle School and Elmira Free Academy throughout the 1970s and 80s. Then Cameron left the Southern Tier to attend the University of Dayton in Ohio, majoring in Fine Art Photography and American History. Although, he wanted to return to his hometown after college, his parents discouraged
him. “There were no jobs for a photography/history major in Elmira,” he explains. “I planned to eventually move to Chicago or New York City, but St. Louis is very affordable with lots to do, and so many great people, that I fell in love with the area. Between me, my roommate and another friend that moved in, we were able to rent a 4-bedroom house for about $200/month each.”
So instead, he settled in St. Louis, rooming with a couple of college friends. After observing that his friends who moved to Chicago were spending their entire paycheck on a cramped apartment, while he shared an entire house with two friends and STILL had enough money for a few pints at the neighborhood pub and tickets to a baseball game, Cameron ended up making St. Louis his home. “I fell in love with the city and its history,” he says. Cameron had a brush with history of his own when he met future POTUS, then-Senator Barack Obama, in 2006 while volunteering for Claire McCaskill’s campaign. As a volunteer he got invited to a rally and got to shake Obama’s hand. When he first moved to St. Louis in 1995, Cameron bounced around the city getting acquainted with his new home and finding out what he wanted in life, apropos of most twenty-something’s trying to figure out their place in the world. Eventually, he became interested in the city’s wealth of interesting history, especially related to one of his favorite pastimes, drinking. In 2012, he started the online column Distilled History, A Drinking Blog with a History Problem, to explore some of St. Louis more colorful legends related to libations. Although the blog focused on regional history, he was able to include a couple of popular posts about some really interesting hometown history about Langdon Mansion and the water therapy spa on Elmira’s Water Cure Hill, that he researched and wrote during his visits home to see his mother, Susan Collins. “The two blog posts I wrote about Elmira history … about Langdon Mansion and the Water Cure resort – are among my favorite blog posts of all time,”
