By Larry Felton Johnson

Even if I weren’t periodically using newspapers from past decades and centuries to put together articles on the history of Cobb County, I’d browse the Georgia Historic Newspaper database, because there are so many entertaining and quirky stories in old newspapers.

This story involves Cobb agriculture, specifically one cow in Acworth.

Cobb County is not known for its agriculture today. But until the construction of the Bell Bomber plant during WWII, Cobb was an agricultural county, with thriving poultry and dairy farms.

Page 10 of the March 8, 1920 of the Atlanta Georgian had an article in which it was announced near the bottom that an Acworth farmer had a dairy cow with the highest butterfat production in the United States.

I’m somewhat skeptical that data collection on dairy farm butterfat production was sufficiently comprehensive to make that determination. What I think is true is that the Acworth cow was the highest producer of any cow entered into agricultural show competitions.

Here’s the text of the article. You can see it on its original page by following this link.

State Leads All South In Jersey Cows

Tests Show Georgia Has More
Cows Producing 50 Pounds
of Butterfat a Month

Coincident with the announcement Monday that 400 owners of registered Jersey cattle in Georgia are to meet in Atlanta March 22 to organize a State Jersey Cattle Breeders’ Association, it was made known that Georgia led all Southern states in an official test throughout the United States of cows producing fifty pounds or more of butterfat per month.

This information was contained in the latest monthly report of the American Jersey Cattle Club, appearing in the Jersey Bulletin, the official publication. The tests in Georgia were supervised by the animal husbandry division of the Georgia State College of Agriculture.

Milton P. Jarnagin, animal husbandman for the college, gave out the following statement:

“In all of the Southern states, Georgia ranks first with nine cows in the 50-pound list. Texas, her nearest competitor, has eight. The three next states had two cows each qualifying, and the three remaining states had only one cow each. Four different breeders in the state own cows that made above 50 pounds of butterfat in the month, whereas not more than two breeders from any other state had cows yielding such high production.

“The nine high-testing cows in Georgia averaged 60.31 pounds of butterfat per cow. This would be the equivalent of 70.95 pounds of butter per cow in thirty days. J. R. Humphrey of Acworth, Ga., had the distinction of owning the highest-producing cow in the United States on official test for the 30-day period in the class of cows 3½ to 4 years of age.

“At the recent international livestock exhibits, B. B. Mark and Sons of Thomasville had the grand champion Hereford bull, and Peacock and Hodge of Cochran had the grand champion Duroc-Jersey.”

About Georgia Historic Newspapers

Georgia Historic Newspapers is a part of the GALILEO project and is housed at the University of Georgia. It’s an amazing resource for anyone with an interest in the history of Georgia and its regions.

According to the “About” page on its website:

The Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG), a part of Georgia’s Virtual Library GALILEO and is based at the University of Georgia Libraries. Since 2007, the DLG has partnered with universities, archives, public libraries, historical societies, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions to digitize historical newspapers from around the state. The archive is free and open for public use and includes over two million Georgia newspaper pages between 1763 and 2021.

Newspaper titles are regularly digitized and added to the archive. If you are interested in including a particular title, you can visit our participation page. A majority of the newspapers on this site were digitized from the microfilm produced by the Georgia Newspaper Project (GNP). For more information about the microfilm available through the GNP, please visit their website.

To read more articles the Courier wrote with help from the Georgia Historic Newspapers database, please follow this link.