A Child Bride in Tennessee

In 1940, census enumerator Neal Harvey recorded the names of four people in Henry N. Johns’s household in Hancock County, Tennessee: farmer Henry N. Johns, sixty-five; wife Mary J., sixty-seven; son Charlie, twenty-seven (also a farmer), and daughter-in-law Eunis, twelve. That last recorded age was not done so in error, though the girl’s name was misspelled.¹ Twenty-five-year-old Charlie Johns and Eunice Winstead were married there on 19 January 1937—when the bride was only nine.²

Word of the shocking wedding spread quickly, sparking outrage nationwide when newspapers splashed the headline-grabbing story with pictures of the lanky farmer and his flaxen-haired child bride. The newlyweds retreated into seclusion after journalists, photographers, and movie cameramen descended upon Sneedville, the isolated hamlet of 1,000 souls that the couple called home.³ “I wouldn’t issue a marriage license to a nine-year-old child if both parents were along,” said court clerk Will Key from across the state in Madison County. “They would have to have a court order to make me issue such a license,” he said.⁴

Tennessee’s state laws prohibited the issuance of a marriage license if either party were under the age of eighteen without parental permission or that of a guardian.⁵ However, the no-age limit rule with parental consent was also allowed in Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, and Missouri. “Only the census taker knows of all the ‘baby brides’ and he never tells who they are,” the Associated Press announced that year. In 1890, brides under fifteen totaled 1,411—not including twenty-nine widows and divorcees. That number increased to 3,482 during the next two decades. Yet, in 1930 enumerators reported 4,506 brides under fifteen (including 167 widows and 96 divorcees). Of these, 1,240 lived in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee, followed by 1,053 in Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, West Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.⁶

What became of Eunice Winstead Johns? She enrolled in elementary school the summer following her scandalous wedding, only to quit days later after being “soundly switched” by her teacher for “general mischievousness.” Her husband, Charlie Johns, disagreed with the punishment, saying that the teacher “couldn’t whip another man’s wife.”⁷ In December 1942, fourteen-year-old Eunice gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter.⁸ Eight more children followed as Charlie and Eunice Johns remained in Sneedville and farmed.⁹ Charlie died in 1997.¹⁰ Eunice Winstead Johns survived her husband by nearly a decade, dying in 2006.¹¹

The Winstead-Johns marriage led to Governor Gordon Browning’s signing into law a bill that made sixteen the minimum age of marriage in Tennessee.¹²

NOTES AND REFERENCES