R.H. Welch Successful Owner of Stockton Farm, November 1921

Stockton, the home of the R.H. Welch family, near Woodville in Perquimans County, is one of the most picturesque and most comfortable rural homes in Northeastern North Carolina. It was built in 1800, but has every convenience of a modern home supplied by its present owner, excepting steam heat. Stockton has eight huge open Colonial fire places in as many rooms and Mr. Welch has a wood lot big enough to keep them going. No steam heat for one who can enjoy such luxuries as eight fire places and a forest of fire wood to feed them. Photo by W.O. Saunders.

Mr. Welch owns a farm of more than 500 acres and is one of the most successful farmers in this sectionl. He says of all his acres that his 75 acres of pasture pay him best. From this pasture last year he sold $1,800 worth of beef cattle.

Stockton Never Hurt by Cotton. . . When Cotton-Growing Neighbors Get Hungry, R.H. Welch Sells Them Corn and Bacon

Nine miles from Elizabeth City, just around the corner from the village of Woodville in Perquimans County is Stockton. Stockton is a farm of 500 and some acres and one of the most attractive home places in Northeastern North Carolina. Here one finds an old Colonial mansion built after the style of Jefferson’s Monticello and built in the midst of a 16-acre grove carved from the virgin wilderness. There are 238 trees in that grove, 26 different varieties in all, and every tree a native tree.

Stockton was originally the home of one Josiah Granby who built it in the year 1800 and built it honestly as houses were then built. There Is not a knot or a blemish to be found in any piece of timber in the house to-day and oaken doors made on the premises and hung in place nearly a century and a quarter ago haven’t a crack or a warp in them after all these many years.

Stockton is the home of Robert H. Welch. Mr. Welch bought the place in 1903 for $8,000. It would take just about $100,000 to get it away from him to-day. Robt. H. Welch is one of the most successful farmers and one of the best citizens in Northeastern North Carolina. He is a native of Chowan County. His ancestors were originally settlers and his mother still lives on the lands deeded by ancestors by the Crown more than 200 years ago. But ancestral history, pride and tradition couldn’t hold this man Welch in Chowan County after he had seen Stockton in 1903 and taken an option at $8,000.

There is an unmistakable air of prosperity about Stockton. Robt. H. Welch is a stock law farmer. While his neighbors have raised cotton and let their pigs and cattle run at large, Mr. Welch has raised corn, peas and cotton and turned most of his pens and corn into pigs. He has prospered while many of his neighbors have run down at the heel. Many of the farmers between Woodville and Durants Neck raise cotton and little else. They raise cotton and buy corn and pork from R.H. Welch. Last year most of the farmers in that neighborhood went broke when cotton dropped from 40 cents to 10 cents a pound. But the Welch children went off to college. Stockton carried on because it wasn’t dependent upon cotton. Mrs. Welch herself sold about $1,400 worth of turkeys off her yard last year. Mr. Welch sold $1,800 worth of beef cattle off his pasture. He also sold several thousand pounds of bacon, having packed all of his pork instead of shipping it on the hoof or selling it on the rack. One lot of 400 pounds of his hams shipped to the Norfolk market brought him 38 cents a pound.

Of all the acres in Stockton, Mr. Welch thinks his 75 acres of pasture the most profitable. It was from this pasture he sold $1,800 worth of beef cattle last year and will probably do as well this year. The stock on his pasture gets no other feed from early April to late in November. In November he turns his pigs and cattle into the fields to forage upon the corn and peas left from the harvesting. Only on rare occasions when the fields are covered with ice and snow is the live stock given any other feed; then the stock is brought into shelters and fed upon shucks, hay and other cheap feeds for which there is no ready market.

And R.H. Welch hasn’t worked himself to death making good on his farm. He has a cultured and helpful wife, they read the daily newspapers and leading periodicals, enjoy good books and music n the home and find time to come to town several times in a week. Any farmer who is having a hard time of it might learn a thing or two from R.H. Welch of Stockton.

From the front page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Nov. 11, 1921. To learn more about Stockton, see the Wikipedia entry at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockton_(Woodville,_North_Carolina).