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The Collard Festival Ayden is probably the only town in the United States with collards growing on Main Street. Collards are tall, tough greens that thrive in the colder months in the South and thus are prized as a fresh vegetable when few are to be had. At one time almost every rural home in the South had a collard patch out back. Collards have to be cooked a long time to make them tender enough to eat, and it has been said that a single pot of them cooking is enough to smell up a whole county. Despite the fact that collards grow on Main Street and Bum's Restaurant has collards on the menu every day, folks in Ayden aren't known to grow or eat more collards than anybody else. So why do they celebrate collards every year early in September? Blame it on a Yankee. Lois Theuring moved to Ayden when her husband's company transferred him to nearby Greenville. She frequently wrote articles for the local weekly newspaper, the News-Leader. She also hated collards. In one article that she wrote about the things she liked about the South, she closed every paragraph with a disparaging remark about collards. As it happened, some people in town were then thinking about organizing a festival to compete with nearby Grifton's highly successful Shad Festival, and a local businessman, Willis Manning, wrote a letter to the editor asking for ideas. He closed it by facetiously suggesting the Mrs. Theuring might agree to organize a collard festival. Lois Theuring surprised everybody by doing just that. She organized the first one in 1975 and it was a great success. She moved back to Ohio the following year, and the last anybody in Ayden heard she still hated collards. The festival she organized grows bigger every year. It includes a parade, carnival, and numerous other events. The most popular event is the collard-eating contest. It usually isn't a pretty sight, since not all the contestants are able to hold their collards. The all-time collard-eating champion is Desmond Rogers, a 340-pound pickup truck dealer from Snow Hill, who has won the contest every time he has entered. He once downed six and a quarter pounds of collards in a single sitting.
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