ISSUE 84, SOUTHERN LANDRACE & HEIRLOOM CORN, Part 14: Looney Corn
Looney White Dent
Looney was one of the finest of southern white dent corns improved at the end of the 19th century. When Charles S. Looney of Winchester, Franklin County, Tennessee began exhibiting his white kerneled white cobbed corn in the 1900s, the judges at the State Fair declared it was “damn handsome corn.” He won prizes in the 1911 Fair and shortly thereafter Looney became the favorite corn of farmers in southeastern Tennessee and north Alabama. Regular, thick cored, deeply set and uniform in configuration. It was a short stature variety that rarely blew down in storms or suffered water damage since the husks were tight and ripe ears bowed down on the stalk. As the picture below suggests, it is something special. But its most remarkable attribute is that it is a white dent corn that was repeatedly commended for flavor, aside from its virtues as a field crop.
How Looney White Dent came into being is a story of farmer mass selection of landrace Tennessee Red Cob corn. Numbers of farmers selected Tennessee Red Cob Corn, a staple of the Yuchi. The Yuchi’s corn survives in two landraces (PI608539 & PI 311235) and eight settler-adapted strains in the USDA grains collection. Of these adapated strains two are Neal’s Paymaster (PI 452047) and Neal’s Paymaster Yellow (PI 452048), developed by T. H. Neal of Lebanon, TN, at the turn of the 20th century. Looney is another one of these, an early twentieth-century improvement of a 19th-century strain developed by Squire Watson of Big Flat Creek, Bedford County. Watson began mass selecting a strain in 1846 to remove the red from of the cob. Prior to Looney, M. C. Webb of Shelbyville in 1890 took up the strain and and developed a fat eared white kernel 18 row corn.that formed two ears on a stalk. This became known as Webb-Watson corn. Shortly after 1890 Charles Looney began his own adaptation of the Squire Watson strain of white dent. He lived in the contiguous county to Watson’s. Although Looney won prizes for quality in the early 20th century, only one grower left of this classic southern white dent remained in 2018, Jeff Swann, who had secured the seed from a 90 + year old neighbor before his death. Swann placed seed in the hands of the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and Blackberry Farm to insure its survival.
https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail?id=2098633