Whiteville and
Columbus were
on the upswing
in 1923 report

Editors note: The following was published in The Star newspaper in 1923. The story indicates that good things were happening here. We rerun it here today to give readers food for thought.

Can this positive energy re-emerge beginning in 2008 as the county approaches its bicentennial in October?

Readers will note that much of the article centers around agricultural production. One of the primary challenges facing the county today is making the transition from an agrarian economy to an economy of another sort, or, as some argue, doing more to remake farming the profitable venture it once was with alternative crops.

Making a city fit to live in is the function of a progressive municipal administration.

Year by year, Whiteville is becoming a good residential town as well as a growing town. Bonds have been sold for the purpose of installing a waterworks system and for the construction of an electric lighting plant. The preliminary arrangements are being made for beginning work on both plants.

Somewhere down in the southeastern neck of North Carolina, there is bound to be a city, and Whiteville is going to be it. Few county seat towns in North Carolina have made the substantial progress scored by Whiteville during the past 10 years.

Whiteville’s new courthouse is a handsome structure, and her new hotel is worthy of a town much larger.

Whiteville’s paved streets are impressive, especially the boulevard connecting Whiteville and Vineland, which are vigorous Siamese twins. The evidence of prosperity in each are manifest on all sides, and while they are separate towns, a stranger would not know it. They have about grown together. They have progressive banks, good schools and prosperous business houses.

The Whiteville News Reporter is one of the best county papers in North Carolina, and we expect Editor Keziah most any time to claim 3,000 population for his two towns in one. Whiteville is a tobacco warehouse market and it’s a good cotton market when the staple is produced to any extent. However, the boll weevil picked Columbus County for its pioneer devastation in North Carolina, and cotton production in the county may not exceed 3,000 to 4,000 bales this year.

Nevertheless, the boll weevil cuts no ice with the prosperity of a county so marvelously resourceful as Columbus. She grows fine yellow tobacco, and her strawberry production brings into the country several hundred thousand dollars in April and May.

Columbus grows more papershell pecans than any county in North Carolina, and her progress in swine and poultry raising is hardly exceeded by any county in the state.

Even Whiteville has become the center of a new strawberry industry, and efforts are being made to make it a station for the refrigerated train service of the Atlantic Coast Line this spring. Just now there is plenty of doing in Columbus.

Many growers have already prepared their tobacco beds and have the seed sown. Within another week or two travelers who are unacquainted with tobacco growing will be wondering at the canvass-covered beds that will dot the roadsides all over the county.

In Columbus everything gets a move on itself with the advent of the new year. One can go anywhere in Columbus now and find people busily engaged in cultivating and hoeing strawberries. This crop, by the way, is said to be exceptionally promising and the expectations are for a big production of the berries in Columbus.

Largely as a result of the poultry exhibit at the county fair last fall, there is now a great deal of interest being manifested in poultry raising in this county. Mr. Lazar and Miss Lankford, county and home agents, are working cooperatively in this matter.

Mr. Lazar reports quite a bit of recent activity looking toward better poultry raising.

Mr. C.D. Harrelson of Tabor has just recently built a modern brooder house and a 100-hen poultry house.

He has bought a good incubator and has taken off the second hatch of 140 chicks.

Mr. R.P. Britt has finished, a 200-chick brooder house and has a hatch from his large incubator. He has also bought a second incubator and a good brooder stove. Mr. B.B. Blake is now building a 200-chick brooder house.

Farmers in this county are yearly becoming more alive to the importance of agricultural lime on wetlands. One dealer here in Whiteville has made two sales of 100 tons each to be used on farms in the county, and many smaller sales are being made daily. One of the buys of 100 tons are Messrs. Richard and Rone Lewis. They will use it on their farm at Cat Tail Bay, 12 miles below Whiteville. About 250 acres of the Lewis farm is cultivated in corn, half one year and the other half the next. The land is low-lying and somewhat marshy and ordinary fertilizers do not prove satisfactory.

Corn and hogs are the chief productions on the place and it is understood that the plans are to make this place a hog farm, growing enough corn for all needs. About 90 head of hogs are now on the place and this number will be increased shortly until they hope to have enough for two or three carloads for the packing houses this summer.

A Virginian recently informed The Star that he had located in Columbus to go into the farm dairy industry and while he found all the adaptabilities for that branch of farm industry even more remarkable than he anticipated, he had to limit his efforts because there is no creamery market in Wilmington. However, he devoted himself to diversified production of a kind that makes cotton-growing look like 30 cents. He never grew any cotton in his life and says he doesn’t have to grow cotton in a county that will produce numbers of crops worth more than cotton to any farmer. He proposes to remain in Columbus and grow up with the county.

Whiteville has a chamber of commerce and its activities include promotion work in the entire county as well as at the county seat. The chamber is now making a fight for just freight rates to all points in the county. Whiteville is the home of Representative Homer Lyon, and our sixth district congressman has assured the Whiteville chamber that he will render all the assistance possible at Washington. Columbus wants reasonable freight rates, for she expects to greatly increase her shipments of strawberries, and truck this season.