Woman of the Century/May Eddins Welborn

WELBORN, Mrs. May Eddins, journalist, born near Demopolis, Ala., 25th February, 1860. She is the youngest child of a family of eight children. She was educated in the Judson Female Institute, Marion, Ala., where she was graduated in 1876. Her first literary work was done a year before graduation, when she began to write for the children's department of the Louisville "Courier Journal." Her life, when not in boarding-school, was spent in her plantation home. The blood of old patriots flows in her veins. Her grandfather was Benjamin Eddins, a pioneer of South Carolina. Through her mother she was descended from Charles Stewart, a Scotchman, who before the Revolution fled from religious persecutions to America, settling in South Carolina, thence moving to Georgia and finally to Alabama. The first work of Miss Eddins that attracted much attention were papers in the "Home and Farm." Those papers attracted the attention of one of the most noted agricultural editors and writers of the South, Col. Jeff Welborn, who. learning after much effort the writer's name, for Miss Eddins had written over a pen-name, went from Texas to Alabama to see the writer whose work had so pleased him. The writer herself pleased him even more than her work, and it was not long ere Col. Welborn persuaded her to become Mrs. Welborn, and they were married 23rd October, 1890. Mrs. Welborn has, since the death of her mother in 1891, been able to write but little. Her suburban home, an experimental farm in New Boston, Texas, is an ideal one for an agricultural writer and scientific farmer and his wife who is prepared by education, training and choice to understand and appreciate all of her husband's labors. They have one child.