Large Families Praised, 1910

From the Lexington Dispatch, September, 1910

Mr. T.E. Whitaker writes the Raleigh News and Observer:

In your interesting editorial entitled “the Corn King and the Cotton King,” you say you counted 42 ears of corn on four stalks. That is good, but here is one better. A few days ago I was in the Concord section of Person county, famed for its fine tobacco, and in three families, neighbors and kinsmen, I found 35 living children. There were no nubbins and the corn was “small cobbed and deep grained.”

I took dinner with Mr. C.E. Winstead, father of 13. He is cultivating 300,000 hills of tobacco, sells his crop for from $8,000 to $10,000, has fat horses and rubber-tired buggies, an elegant home with a piano in it, educates his boys and girls, the oldest of whom is less than 23 years of age, and all are proud of the baby, a lusty youngster of 18 months, as if he were the first.  You’re off with your hat to the corn king and the cotton king, which is all right; but I take mine off and make a low bow to the Kings and Queens of the “Anti-Race Suiciders.”

Commenting on Mr. Whitaker’s letter, the News and Observer says:

“That man and his wife would be hailed in Paris as the saviors of the French Republic, and in France had three families with 35 children in one neighborhood the enthusiastic French people would do them honor. In North Carolina, where race suicide is practically unknown, such families do not receive the honor due them. It was reported from Iredell last week that one man was the father of 27 living children. A country like that does not need to import immigrants. They can say, “We raise our own immigrants.” Prof. Whitaker is right. It is a much greater contribution to rear a large family of children than to raise the biggest corn and cotton. Can any country show a better anti-race suicide record than Person and Iredell counties? If so, let them have their place son the roll of honor.