By Chris Kornelis

The news was good, but also disheartening: Toyota Motor was planning to build its first stand-alone factory in the U.S., but her state wasn't in consideration. By working the phones and back channels, Martha Layne Collins was able to land a meeting in Japan, where she asked the carmaker's president what it would take for his company to build automobiles in Kentucky.

Shoichiro Toyoda's wish list included 1,500 flat acres that the company could have free. That wouldn't be easy, since Kentucky's constitution barred the government from giving away land to private companies. But Collins was undeterred. In 1985, Kentucky's economy was tired, its textile, coal and tobacco industries on the decline. Toyota was a chance to go in a new direction.

Collins, the first (and only) woman elected governor of Kentucky -- who died Nov. 1 at the age of 88 -- told Toyoda it all sounded doable and promised to be in touch with a proposal. After the meeting, she turned to Larry Hayes, her cabinet secretary, and asked: "Now, how are we gonna do that?"

Before politics

Born in Shelbyville, Ky., on Dec. 7, 1936, Martha Layne Hall and her family lived in nearby Bagdad for a time before eventually moving to Shelbyville, where her parents, Everett and Mary Hall, owned and operated a funeral home. She competed in -- and won -- pageants and was active in her Baptist church, before getting a degree in home economics from the University of Kentucky. Collins taught home economics in high school and math in junior high before she transitioned into politics, elected clerk of the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 1975 and then lieutenant governor in 1979.

As lieutenant governor, Collins presided over the state Senate the way she presided over a classroom: standing up. As a candidate for governor, she visited every one of the state's 120 counties because she wanted to know the personality of the counties the way she had known the personalities of her students. Elected governor in 1983, when she didn't like a story in the local press, she called the reporter into the principal's office.

"She conducted herself like a schoolteacher," said Jack Brammer, a longtime political commentator in Kentucky, "and we reporters were like her students."

But when the opportunity came along to pitch Toyota, she leaned on a lesson she learned listening to her father take calls at the funeral home all hours of the day.

"I just believe in service," she said in an oral history interview with the Eastern Kentucky University Research Center for Special Collections & Archives. "You go the extra mile. Just do whatever you can do to make things happen. That's my customer. Toyota was my customer. I was providing a service."

In an effort to gain an edge over Tennessee, which was still in the running with Toyota, Collins worked on the broad strokes of the deal and the tiniest details -- from the constitutionality of a nine-figure incentives package to picking up the Toyota delegation at the airport herself and hosting them for a dinner at the governor's mansion. She knew her guests had studied the music of Stephen Foster in school, so she arranged for a group to serenade them with songs like "Oh! Susanna" and "My Old Kentucky Home." Because they liked fireworks, she served baked Alaska topped with sparklers for dessert and surprised them with a fireworks show that annoyed the neighbors but delighted her guests.

Charm offensive

After Toyota broke ground in Georgetown, Ky., in 1986, the industry followed. Toyota now employs nearly 10,000 manufacturing employees in Kentucky and the state's broader automotive manufacturing industry employs another 48,000. Combined, Kentucky assembles more than a million vehicles a year, trailing only Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, according to AutoForecast Solutions, an automotive analytics company.

Hayes, Collins's cabinet secretary, said in an interview that while there was significant consternation in the state about electing a woman to be governor, the uniqueness of her being a woman helped her get a meeting with Toyota in the first place. And her ability to charm the company's executives is widely credited with helping her bring the project to Kentucky.

"I don't think a man in the same position in that same situation would've been able to lure them in," said Barbara Hadley Smith, her former press secretary. "They were just charmed by her for one thing, the leaders of the company. The second thing is, she really paid attention to detail."

A career derailed

Kentucky governors were limited to a single term when she left office in 1987, and Collins's political future looked bright. A Democrat, she was even considered a possible running mate for Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential run. But her political career ended when her husband, Bill Collins, a dentist and businessman, was convicted in 1993 of extorting money from people who had business before the state while his wife was governor. Gov. Collins wasn't charged.

"If she didn't know," said Al Cross, a retired University of Kentucky journalism professor and longtime Kentucky reporter, "she should have known what her husband was up to."

The Collins family has always contended that the prosecution was a political hit job.

Bill Collins survives her, as do her children, Steve and Marla Webb.

While the scandal ended her political career, her reputation largely recovered in Kentucky, where her crowning achievement -- Toyota's factory in Georgetown -- transformed the state's economy.

"Few partnerships," Kentucky's current governor, Andy Beshear, said at Collins's funeral, "can claim more widespread or impactful results for our commonwealth or our people."

Write to Chris Kornelis at chris.kornelis@wsj.com

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November 21, 2025 08:00 ET (13:00 GMT)

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