Early Years
Colgate Whitehead Darden was born on February 11, 1897, in Southampton County. He was the son of Colgate Whitehead Darden, a farmer and businessman, and his first wife, Katharine Lawrence Pretlow Darden. His younger brother, J. Pretlow Darden Sr., became a reform mayor of Norfolk after World War II.
Darden grew up on the family farm and attended the Franklin public schools. He studied at the University of Virginia for two years beginning in 1914. After World War I began in Europe, Darden volunteered with an ambulance corps of the American Field Service in France, contracted malaria in the trenches near Verdun, and then returned home. Undeterred by the experience, he won his pilot’s wings and returned to France as a marine aviator after the United States entered the war in 1917. About two weeks before the 1918 armistice, Darden was seriously injured in a bomber crash and required about ten months’ hospitalization.