[2] He lived "the privileged life of a wealthy Black Belt planter and merchant during the 1850s," but "lost more than half his 3,000 acres of land, and his once-prosperous mercantile store failed."

He then managed the Eufaula theater and achieved some success as a truck farmer and developer and distributor of seed stock.

[3] But with cotton prices declining and poor farmers increasingly forced into sharecropping, Kolb in 1892 challenged the coalition of industrialists and wealthy planters.

His third-party agricultural protest movement sought to join poor farmers and sharecroppers with industrial workers and Black voters to assail privilege and power.

The elections he lost in 1892 and 1894 (to Thomas Goode Jones and William C. Oates, respectively) are considered to have been some of the most corrupt in Alabama's history, with widespread vote tampering and fraud.