Toronto’s Baby Derby: The Bizarre Race Sparked by a Millionaire’s Will

On Halloween 1926, a wealthy Toronto lawyer named Charles Vance Millar died, and his will kicked off a ten-year contest to see which mother could have the most babies. It’s one of those moments where a city's private drama becomes a massive public spectacle. Last week, we talked about London’s 'Great Stink' forcing Parliament to finally build a sewer system. This is like that, but instead of sewage, the crisis was poverty, and the solution wasn't infrastructure—it was a dead millionaire’s practical joke. So Charles Vance Millar was this incredibly successful lawyer, but also a notorious bachelor and prankster. He loved getting a rise out of people.

And his will? It was his masterpiece. He left shares in a brewery to a group of famously anti-alcohol temperance ministers. He left shares in a horse-racing club to clergymen who preached against gambling. He was basically trolling people from beyond the grave. But the final clause, the ninth clause, was the big one. He stipulated that the massive residue of his estate—we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars—would go to the Toronto mother who gave birth to the most children in the ten years after his death. And just like that, the "Great Stork Derby" was on. Now, here’s where the timing gets absolutely brutal. The contest ran from 1926 to 1936.

It started in the roaring twenties and ended in the absolute depths of the Great Depression. So what might have been a quirky local story became a desperate, national obsession. For families with nothing, who were losing their farms and their jobs, this wasn't a game. It was a lottery ticket. The only entry fee was… well, you get the idea. The press went wild, tracking the leading families like they were sports teams. And of course, you see the pattern here, right? This is a reality show. It’s MrBeast, a century early. A rich guy setting up a bizarre contest with a life-changing prize. You have a charismatic, slightly unhinged benefactor, a cast of ordinary people pushed to extraordinary lengths, and a public that can't look away.

But here’s where that analogy breaks down. MrBeast is entertainment. His contests are spectacles of choice. The Great Stork Derby was a spectacle of desperation. Millar's distant relatives certainly thought so. They sued to have the will thrown out, arguing it was "contrary to public policy"—that it encouraged people to have children they couldn't afford, turning family life into a crass competition. They took it all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. And the Supreme Court said… the will stands. A man can do what he wants with his money. So what happened? The contest ended in 1936. After all the legal battles and all the births, the court had to figure out who won.

It was a mess. Some kids were stillborn, some were illegitimate—did they count? In the end, the judges decided to split the prize. Four women, who had each given birth to nine children in the ten-year window, were declared the winners. They each got about one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. That's over two million dollars in today's money. Two other women who had technically had more babies but ran into the legitimacy rules were given smaller consolation prizes. Millar thought he was setting up a final, grand joke on human greed. He wanted to show how ridiculous people could be for money. But the Depression flipped the script.

It wasn't a joke on the contestants; it was an indictment of a system where having nine kids in ten years could seem like a rational economic decision. The punchline wasn't that people were greedy. The punchline was that for a decade in Canada, a dead man's prank was a better social safety net than the government.