Marriage of Old Man to 16-Year-Old Ends with Tears, June 19, 1926

Age and Youth Fail to Agree. . . And Young Bride at Elizabeth City Forsakes her Aged Husband

Elizabeth City, June 18—They begged him not to do it but the neighbors down on Stumpy Point about seven years ago when Uncle Billy Payne, more than 60 years old, decided to take unto himself a wife of 16 summers. Uncle Billy was right spry. He had young notions and he wouldn’t take the advice of his neighbors.

It wasn’t long before the 16-year-old bride soon learned that her husband’s idea of life and those of her ownself didn’t run together. The bride, being younger, liked to go out occasionally and if the old man was tired, she went alone. Uncle Billy soon got fretful about it. They had words and separated. But after a time they would go back together.

Finally after several intervals of separation and reunion the wife said she might be a little happier if Uncle Billy would sell out his home and move up to ?? the county seat where things are livelier. Uncle Billy left the comfortable place he owned in the Utopian village of Stumpy Point and pitched his tent toward Sodom, as some of the neighbors expressed it. There he built a cozy little cottage for his bride.

But the bride couldn’t content herself in a little love nest with a husband who is now 69 years old. Things went from bad to worse until she left the old man recently and went to East Lake to live with relatives.

The climax came this week when Mrs. Payne appeared before Judge Grady in superior court here with her three-year-old child in her arms. Uncle Billy Payne had come up from Stanley to ask for the child that had been born to them. The mother had been caught in a rooming house some weeks ago and found guilty of conduct unbecoming a wife and mother, and the man in this case being A.N. Holmes, East Lake married man. The court awarded Uncle Billy Payne the custody of the child.

While the mother sat in the courtroom and wept, Uncle Billy Payne bent with grief, carried the sobbing little girl from the courtroom and down the street. Its piteous wails audible a block away. Three grieving hearts miserable because an aging man wanted a 16-year-old wife!

From page 5 of The Goldsboro News, Saturday morning, June 19, 1926

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