‘‘A Better Crop of Boys and Girls’’: The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920

Sally Gregory Kohlstedt

In the 1890s progressive educators like John Dewey proposed expansive ideas about integrating school and society. Working to make the boundaries between classroom learning and pupils’ natural environment more permeable, for example, Dewey urged teachers to connect intellectual and practical elements within their curricula.1 Highly visible and widespread examples of this integrative goal were the school gardens that flourished from the 1890s well into the twentieth century. Evidence of their presence is recorded in newspapers, national magazines, and annual school reports whose illustrations typically portrayed well-dressed children cultivating large gardens next to impressive urban school buildings. Whether in large cities or country settings, school gardens were expressions of modern and progressive education of the sort encouraged by Dewey. Gardens were encouraged in theory and in practice not only at the laboratory school affiliated with the University of Chicago but also in normal schools across the country (Figure 1).2

Sally Gregory Kohlstedt is a professor with the Program in History of Science and Technologyat the University of Minnesota. The author wishes to thank colleagues who at various points helped move this project along, including Amy Fisher, Donald Opitz, David Sloane, Paul Brinkman, Nancy Beatty, three anonymous reviewers, and HEQ editors, as well as librarians who assiduously helped the author track down obscure references, sometimes while she was traveling with funds from National Science Foundation grants #0115772 and #9123719. Readers may be interested in the narrative and illustrations on a recently launched site at http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/journey/ schoolgardens.html (October 1, 2007).

1School and Society (1899) was written at a time of optimism and high productivity for John Dewey, and he argued eloquently for schools in which children’s social and natural environments were connected to intellectual and practical instruction. He suggested, among many other things, that object lessons presented for the sake of processing information were no ‘‘substitute for acquaintance with the plants and animals of the farm and garden acquired through actually living among them and caring for them.’’ See John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899–1901, ed. JoAnn Boydon, 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 33–35; quote on 8. 2On Dewey during his years in Chicago and his interaction with Wilbur Jackman, which started well but ended badly, see Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey: A Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 199–210.

History of Education Quarterly Vol. 48 No. 1 February 2008 The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 59

Figure 1. Normal schools built in the latter decades of the nineteenth century were impressive monuments to education, like the Massachusetts State Normal School at Hyannis (now used for city business). Its adjoining land was made into a school garden, here cultivated by second grade pupils at the practice school and under the supervision of prospective teachers.

Typically photographed during spring planting season or later when colorful tulips, daisies or sunflowers reached full bloom and healthy vegetables like corn, peas, and cabbages were harvested, school gardens were initially an expression of the nature study movement that introduced science into the public schools. The process of gardening was a way to stimulate children’s curiosity and enthusiasm, according to Wilbur Jackman, whose Nature Study for the Common Schools textbook was a catalyst for teaching nature study. A prote´ge´ of Francis W. Parkman at Cook County Normal School and later affiliated with Dewey at the University of Chicago, Jackman urged teachers to ‘‘take the spontaneous development of the child’s mind under the influence of the natural environment’’ as a guide to instruction.3 His ‘‘rolling year’’ curriculum had students doing elementary science projects by season, with field trips to study river basins, insect life, local trees and plants, and

3Wilbur S. Jackman, Nature Study for the Common Schools (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1891), 8. On his larger role in education, see Audrey B. Champagne and Leopold E. Klopfer, ‘‘Pioneers of Elementary School Science: Wilbur Samuel Jackman.’’ Science Education 63 (1979): 145–65. 60 History of Education Quarterly other natural phenomena during good weather and indoor observation and experiments during the winter season. Gardens provided a practical addition if proper facilities could be developed close to the schools, allowing children to express themselves through individual projects often in collaboration with their peers under guided supervision. Each garden was shaped and also limited by the dedication and skill of instructors, the involvement of the pupils, the nature of the sites available, and the kinds of tools and other supports provided by the school and community. As a result, school gardens were malleable projects and could be managed to meet a wide range of expectations. This versatility contributed to their spread across the continent. This article explores expectations surrounding these experimental projects in order to explain their remarkable growth. While school gardens were initially promoted as a method to teach the natural sciences, a wide range of ambitions emerged as proponents sought to provide practical agricultural training, promote an appreciation for the beauty and bounty of nature, or develop civic pride. While some teachers very systematically linked the outdoor work to specific subjects Fgeometric patterns for the garden, arithmetic calculations linked to expenses and production, reading assignments about caring for plants, and art projects that might use materials from nature to create collages or encourage self expression in watercolors or clay sculptureFothers provided simple instructions and presumed that the experience of gardening was itself a lesson. Surprisingly little has been written about these schools gardens, despite the fact that their existence is well recorded in publications and school records in the early twentieth century. The way that they flourished, sometimes on school sites and sometimes at a distance from school, across the United States suggests something of the life cycle of curricular movements more generally as they arrived to enthusiastic reception and support, became varied as they adapted to local opportunities, were to some extent absorbed into the agendas of other educational efforts, and eventually waned when they no longer seem to meet changing expectations or were overtaken by newer enthusiasms. The gardening movement is a particularly striking example of a widely accepted program that nonetheless flourished for just one generation before largely disappearing. School gardens, sometimes but not always linked to the simultaneous growth of nature study, became common at the turn of the century. Whether rural or urban, they gained substantial endorsement from national gardening and agricultural organizations by the 1910s. They became most dramatically visible when the United States School Garden Army, created as part of the World War I domestic war preparedness efforts, numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 61

Indeed, under the aegis of wartime emergency, school gardens were found truly nationwide, stimulated by federal funding but building on the multiple existing sites made possible by school policies and administrators as well as community leaders, parents, and even pupils themselves. During the 1920s, local support and national attention lagged, so that the gardening movement essentially disappeared from public view, although local school gardens continued to persist well into the 1930s and regained some momentum during World War II. In their heyday, school gardens were presented as progressive learning that was thoroughly planned and implemented in order to produce its own good harvest of ripe produce and better-educated children. School gardens reveal how deeply metaphors of nature were embedded in thinking about the educational process at the turn of the century and how ambiguously those ideas have been interpreted. Living nature was viewed as part of organic development that simply occurs; growing up was a natural process. But nature could also be wild, unregulated, even dangerous.4 Children might thus be viewed as tender sprouts needing only nurturing care to flourish, or they might be considered untamed and needing strict tending. In either instance, Progressives believed that human intervention in the natural world, as well as the world of child development, was essential, whether to protect some basic nature, to enhance it, or to control it. The school gardening movement primarily emphasized the abundance and ameliorating effects of nature, but some programs revealed conflicting expectations about both nature and the children who would be working with it. There were thus significant differences of opinion, for example, between proponents who emphasized showing children the wonder and beauty of nature by the study of flowers and trees and those who wanted to teach practical agricultural skills or between those who anticipated that gardens could enhance individual self-expression as well as community cooperation and those who wanted garden programs to instill discipline in unruly juveniles. Whatever the specific expectations, however, advocates were persuaded that school gardens, whether implemented on school grounds, on rooftops, on neighborhood plots, or as part of homework projects, had the potential to produce ‘‘a better crop of boys and girls.’’5

4Nature study was also, in many systems in the 1910s, connected to sex hygiene programs, where the concern about unbridled human nature was very evident. That topic is beyond the scope of this paper but see Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Janice M. Irvine, Talkabout Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 5William A. MeKeever, ‘‘A Better Crop of Boys and Girls.’’ Nature-Study Review 7 (December 1911): 266–68. 62 History of Education Quarterly

Kindergartens to School Gardens Given the fascination with European educational practices and theory at the end of the century, school garden advocates were eager to show connections to similar projects abroad. Familiar to immigrants to the United States and educators who had visited European schools, school gardens were readily identified with advanced pedagogical theory. It was also not by chance that the movement for preschoolers, ‘‘kindergarten,’’ took its name from a playscape that also taught valuable lessons from nature. Progressive educators traced deep roots for the idea of school gardens, sometimes crediting Johann Comenius, a sixteenth-century Moravian educator, with the concept and noting that Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johann Pestalozzi had recommended gardens for educational purposes.6 Central European provincial governments introduced gardening during the first half of the nineteenth century, and after mid-century the idea was adapted by German administrators in Berlin and other large cities. By the end of the nineteenth century, North American educators and textbook writers were discussing the pedagogical potential of school gardens, buttressing their arguments by reference to the widespread and substantial movement abroad. As teacher of nature study and biology at Teachers’ College in New York, Maurice Bigelow reflected on the growing movement in an article on school gardens for A Cyclopedia of Education. The momentum was international, and he explained that Sweden had school land under cultivation in 1871, Berlin public schools were presented with study plants from a central garden plot in that same decade, Austria by 1890 had a law requiring school gardens, and French schoolmasters were required to give practical instruction in gardening in their classrooms.7 Bigelow noted approvingly that most European and perhaps 90 percent of the North American programs (by 1914) were ‘‘conducted as a phase of nature study with a general cultural rather than vocational aim.’’8 While he was the editor of Nature-Study Review from 1905 to 1909, Bigelow resisted efforts to make nature study and gardening vocational, and he accepted only articles that stressed ‘‘the possibilities of great educational value in disciplines other than

6Mattie Rose Crawford, Guide to Nature Study for the Use of Teachers (Toronto: Copp, Clark, Company, 1902): 46–47. 7Maurice A. Bigelow, ‘‘School Gardens,’’ in A Cyclopedia of Education 2, ed. Paul Monroe (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 10–13. 8Bigelow, ‘‘School Gardens,’’ 10. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 63 manual and information which has practical, intellectual, aesthetic and moral bearings.’’9 As reform-minded educators in North American identified promising European developments, they sought to bring them home. In 1879, for example, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann (wife of educational activist Horace Mann) translated a widely used German manual into English as The School Garden, Being a Practical Contribution to Education.10 In 1890 a widely publicized commission of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society sent Henry Lincoln Clapp, headmaster of the George Putnam School of Roxbury, to study school gardens in Europe. He returned to establish a wildflower garden adjoining his school.11 Perhaps in keeping with the wishes of his sponsors; this garden was for children to visit rather than use. Seeking more active involvement of the pupils, Clapp subsequently acquired a nearby vacant lot where pupils themselves laid out beds and pathways, fertilized and planted seeds, and gathered the harvest.12 Soon Clapp became proactive, speaking at educational meetings and publishing articles on children’s gardens in popular journals, establishing an initial emphasis on understanding plant development and the aesthetic pleasure of working with nature. Initiatives in private and model schools propelled the North American movement forward in the 1890s, with reports published on the estimated number of school gardens, requirements for prospective teachers to learn gardening techniques, and popular publications by school administrators and political advocates.13 Although European precedents were frequently cited, indigenous influences that helped under gird the school gardening movement were

9Editorial comment by Maurice A. Bigelow in Nature-Study Review 1 (January 1905): 28–29. He noted that there were hundreds of successful school gardens and no need to duplicate efforts to describe them. Rather, he called for papers that showed how to make gardens educational rather than vocational by showing their intellectual, aesthetic, and moral bearings. 10Erasmus Schwab, The Practical School Garden. Being a Practical Contribution to Education, trans. Mrs. [Mary] Horace Mann (New York: M. L. Holbrook, 1879). 11The Horticultural Society remained involved, establishing a prize for schools (won mostly by Clapp in the early decades) in an effort to show the relationship between manual labor and financial remuneration. See Brian Trelstad, ‘‘The Little Machines in Their Gardens: A History of School Gardens in America, 1890–1925’’ (AB thesis, Harvard University, 1991), 12. Clapp had also attended the well-remembered Penikese Summer School for teachers with Louis Agassiz. 12Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report (1904–1905), 104–5. Van Evrie Kilpatrick, The School Garden: A Laboratory of Nature (New York: School Garden Association, 1940), 3–10. 13See, for example, Laura Joanne Lawson, ‘‘Urban-Garden Programs in the United States: Values, Resources, and Role in Community Development’’ (PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2000); and E. Backert, ‘‘History and Analysis of the School Garden Movement in America, 1890–1910’’ (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1977). 64 History of Education Quarterly multiple, including fears about poorly educated immigrants in major cities, concern about rural out migration from declining farm communities, and heightened attention to nature conservation and preservation. An important positive catalyst was the nature study movement, which first introduced the study of science subjects into the pre high school grades of the public schools in the 1890s and whose most prominent early spokesperson was Cook County Normal School faculty member Wilbur Jackman. This normal school and Harvard University graduate is often noted as founder of the movement because his textbook for teachers, Nature Study for the Common Schools, publicized the name ‘‘nature study’’ and provided an early outline of topics. Reacting to what they viewed as traditional rote and recitation instruction, such early nature study leaders taught with local objects found in nature and, based on Herbartian theories of coordinated learning, linked nature work to drawing, writing, arithmetic, and other traditional school subjects. Nature study gained further visibility and credibility when the Committee of Ten of the National Education Association in 1893 endorsed it as the appropriate preparation for high school science. By the end of the century it was taught in practice schools at the University of Chicago and Teachers College of Columbia University as well as many Midwestern and eastern normal schools, thanks in part to its endorsement by scientists.14 A variety of local models of school gardens reflected public attitudes toward schools, the influence of the ‘‘new education’’ in theory and practice, and the prominence of nature study and elementary science in curricula. School gardens were quickly identified as a versatile and practical method of teaching nature study. Ellen Eddy Shaw, for instance, a botanist who was well positioned as nature study coordinator at the Brooklyn Zoological Garden, pointed to the particular ways school gardens might be adapted to particular setting, noting:

[T]he garden work to pursue in a country district lies along lines of improvement of school grounds and of special problems which strike back to the farm and interest people at home; the work of the town usually is that of home improvement in back yard and front yard and has large aesthetic value; the work of the city is in some cases the big vacant lot problem, in others, the making the most of roofs, small yards and window boxes.15

14Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, ‘‘Nature Not Books: Scientific Initiatives and the Origins of the Nature Study Movement in the 1890s.’’ Isis 96 (September 2005): 324–52. 15Ellen Eddy Shaw, ‘‘The Place of Children’s Gardens.’’ Nature-Study Review 6 (February 1910): 43–45. Shaw, a former teacher and faculty member at the New Paltz Normal School, believed gardens provided children with a wholesome benefit at they worked with plants. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 65

Figure 2. This idealized plan for the Oakdale School had extensive gardens and landscaping, with separate playgrounds for boys and girls, presented in H. D Hemenway, How to Make School Gardens: A Manual for Teachers and Pupils (New York: Double- day, Page, and Co., 1903).

Elaborate plans were published to design an ideal progressive school with attractive landscapes, playgrounds, and school gardens (Figure 2). While faculty at normal schools typically emphasized nature study’s capacity to teach aspects of nature and to reveal the patterns of growing things, many used the vocabulary of nature study and school gardens for distinctly vocational ends, especially, as we shall see, in the Indian boarding schools of the period. The school gardening movement carried the same complex mix of pedagogical, practical, aesthetic, and even moral baggage as the nature 66 History of Education Quarterly study movement.16 While the most substantial evidence for nature study lay in the proliferation of texts and classroom reports, advocates also believed the school garden movement, with its visible presence on the landscape and its multiple layers of public support, demonstrated nature study’s vitality.17 What made school gardening the ‘‘live wire’’ of nature study was its surprising popularity with pupils and the extension of classroom studies into the neighboring communities.18 Some school gardens were planted during the school year, while others were ‘‘vacation school’’ gardens, whose productive cycle better coincided with the growing season in most regions of the United States.19 In all their formulations, gardens were presented as a mechanism for moral, aesthetic or civic uplift, as vocational training, as a way to reacquaint students with traditional skills, as a means to prepare them for advanced work in botany or zoology, or some combination of these. Gardens might grow vegetables or flowers, either product providing teachers with a practical resource to encourage student initiative and to demonstrate cycles of life and seasonal change.20 Promoters often used the metaphor of growth, as in the deliberately double entendre, ‘‘Growing Children in California Gardens.’’ While Henry Clapp was promoting school gardens in New England, it was Wilbur Jackman working with prominent educational leader Francis Parker at Cook County Normal School who advanced the idea in the Midwest and beyond. When Parker moved to the University of Chicago in the late 1890s, he designed a significant garden plot into his new model school on the edge of campus and explicitly linked it to nature study classes. His initial idea was to provide children an opportunity to grow their own plantsFa deliberate departure from Clapp’s demonstration garden. The Chicago garden would include communal grain crops planted in rows, combined with small plots for individual children. After three years, this dual system was found to be

16Fannie Griscom Parsons, a leader of the New York City gardening movement, outlined elaborate plans to one of the nature study leaders, Liberty Hyde Bailey, October 26, 1905, Bailey Papers, Cornell University Archives, Ithaca, New York(hereafter CUA). 17Alice Patterson, faculty member at Illinois Normal School, was confident about the impact of school garden work, perhaps because her own local programs were so successful; see her articles in Nature-Study Review 9 (November 1914) and Nature-Study Review 17 (February 1921): 55–62. 18This prescient phrase was used by Shaw, ‘‘The Place of Children’s Gardens,’’ 43. 19A significant vacation school movement, sponsored by diverse groups that included women’s clubs, labor unions, and civic reformers, had multiple programs and typically sponsored or reinforced the school garden movement. See William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements During the Progressive Period (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 148–76. 20The most recent and useful studies concentrate on particular sites and on the urban aspects of the school garden movement, including Lawson, ‘‘Urban-Garden Programs’’ and Backert, ‘‘History and Analysis of the School Garden Movement.’’ The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 67

‘‘not beautiful’’ as its sprawling plants competed for sunshine and moisture. Teachers assigned upper school pupils to reorganize the garden. Individual plants were chosen and tended by specific children as part of a coordinated plan, which reportedly yielded more satisfying aesthetic and educational results.21 Jackman subsequently wrote up detailed ‘‘Suggestions as to Home Gardens’’ that urged parents to establish similar spaces at home and to encourage ‘‘civic pride’’ in their children as an extension of their school experience.22 By the 1890s, then, nature study educators were exploring the range of possibilities for using school gardens in conjunction with their curriculum. While European developments formed a backdrop and offered a rationale, how gardens were implemented depended almost entirely, as Ellen Shaw suggested, on local circumstances.

Vocationalism in Rural and Indian Schools Rural life and country schools, especially those in farming areas where population was spread out, became the object of considerable, often critical scrutiny in the early twentieth century. Many rural residents, faced with declining land productivity and produce prices, were moving into cities while those who remained in farming communities were falling behind in quality of life, including education. The progressive solutions sought by state commissioners of education, including school consolidation, came so slowly that they turned to other ways of reforming curricula; some found possibilities in the farm extension model of outreach to farmers.23 New York state, confronted with the financial panic of 1893 which had rural residents fleeing the countryside to look for employment in New York City, provided funds to Cornell University to develop a nature study curriculum that could demonstrate the value of country life. This could have meant an emphasis on simple vocational training for farming.24 However, two faculty members at Cornell, Anna Botsford Comstock and Liberty Hyde Bailey, understood the assignment in more complex terms and wanted nature study to be a

21Elsa Miller, ‘‘Garden Work.’’ Elementary School Teacher 6 (January 1906): 246–52. 22Jackman also recommended Liberty Hyde Bailey’s series of Garden-Craft books in an undated pamphlet found with the Jackman correspondence to Anita McCormick Blaine, McCormick Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI. 23The best source on the farm extension movement remains Gould Colman, Education and Agriculture: A History of the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963) and also useful is Ruby Green Smith, The People’s Colleges: A History of the New York State Extension Service in Cornell University and the State, 1876–1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1949). 24This is the theme in Beverly Thomas Galloway’s School Gardens: A Report on Some Cooperative Work in Normal Schools of Washington, Bulletin 160 (United States Department of Agriculture, Office of Experiment Stations, Washington, DC, 1905). 68 History of Education Quarterly

‘‘recognized part of the new educational movement’’ that related education to home life but also enhanced possibilities for that life.25 They developed rural school leaflets, taught nature study to teachers via correspondence courses, and lectured at teachers’ institutes on weekends and over the summer to encourage country school teachers to teach nature study, and, relatedly, to develop school gardens (Figure 3). Hired full-time to work with rural schools, ‘‘Uncle John’’ Spencer even encouraged upstate New Yorkorphanages to plant gardens on their often-extensive grounds.26 The Cornell program became a widely emulated model that spread to California under the encouragement of Stanford University’s President, David Starr Jordan, into the Northeast where former students of Louis Agassiz remained committed to his principle to ‘‘study nature, not books,’’ and throughout the Midwest where land grant institutions and normal schools picked up the curriculum as one relevant to their students.27 Whether to make such gardens agriculturally productive in ways parallel to local farms, however, was debated. Under the leadership of Comstock and Bailey, who were nationally recognized for their approach to study nature first hand, rural schoolteachers and state administrators concentrated on understanding the growth of plants and their relationship to the environment. Some of this work took children into neighboring meadows and woods with a goal of understanding how living things grew in relationship to each other in a natural setting. In other instances, teachers worked with their pupils to create a more domestic environment, using local and sometimes exotic flowers, shrubs, and trees for schoolyard beautification projects. Impressed with such initiatives, state departments of education published pamphlets to demonstrate that artfully arranged perennials and annuals, together with a few strategically placed trees could transform the often barren grounds surrounding one and two-room schools.28

25L. H. Bailey to Senator Allison, January 22, 1907, Bailey Papers, CUA. Also see Anna Botsford Comstock, The Comstocks of Cornell: John Henry Comstock and Anna Botsford Comstock (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1953), 89–197. 26L. H. Bailey described Spencer’s efforts to W. R. George, January 17 and January 19, 1907, Bailey Papers, CUA. 27The first significant historical effort was a thesis at Harvard by Dora Otis Mitchell, ‘‘A History of Nature Study,’’ published in Nature-Study Review 19 (September 1923): 258–74; and (October 1923): 295–321; Also see Pamela M. Henson, ‘‘The Comstocks of Cornell: A Marriage of Interests,’’ in Creative Couples in the Sciences, ed. Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995); and Philip Dorf, Liberty Hyde Bailey: An Informal Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956). 28Detailed plans were provided, for example, in Olly J. Kern’s Teachers’ Course 100, ‘‘Elements of Agriculture, Nature Study, and School Gardens,’’ produced for the University of California, Berkeley, Division of Agricultural Education [1010], copy in the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 69

Figure 3. The Nature Study Department at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, coordinated with local schools in developing a model school garden and produced this pamphlet on school gardening. Rural School Leaflet (April 1908). 70 History of Education Quarterly

There was also early skepticism. Teachers quickly recognized the additional responsibilities entailed in ambitious landscaping projects. It seemed to some more practical (and less burdensome) if the pupils planted useful gardens at home in line with discussions at school, tended gardens over the summer, and brought their results to school in the fall. In the Canadian provinces, where the growing season was short, this was the most common approach.29 Rural parents could be skeptical about school gardening that simply installed gardens for crops, insisting that their children ought to gain basic literary and other skills at school, beyond the practical ones they might learn at home.30 Where parents were not present, however, vocationalism could dominate. Perhaps the most vivid examples of distortion away from the nature study goals of Jackman, Comstock, and Bailey were the school gardening programs in the growing number of Indian boarding and day schools at the turn of the century. The Superintendent of Indian Schools in the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, Estelle Reel, adopted school gardens as part of nature study in the required curriculum. From the outset, she and her staff envisioned a rather tightly controlled set of practices within a highly centralized organizational structure.31 She recommended that each pupil have an individual garden, ‘‘as it involves responsibility and develops the individuality of the pupil.’’ Indian school supervisors met annually with the Department of Indian Education, usually in conjunction with the National Education Association’s annual meetings. Teachers were trained in the prescribed curriculum through summer institutes held at Indian boarding schools, most often in Hampton, VA; Pine Ridge, SD; Tomah, WI; and Newport, OR, where model nature study and garden projects were underway.32 Strict mandates came from the Washington office, some with highly detailed guidelines for the teachers in training and for their pupils in the practice schools attached to them. In addition, teachers’ reading circles were

29On Canada see Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, ‘‘Nature Study in North America and Australasia, 1890–1945.’’ Historical Records of Australian Science 11 (June 1997): 439–54. 30These differing goals are discussed in Kristen Jane Greene, ‘‘The Macdonald Robertson Movement, 1899–1909’’ ((PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2004), chapter 3. 31See the bound volumes of circulars issued by the Superintendent of Indian Schools, 1899–1908, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), #75, Department of the Interior, United States National Archives (hereafter USNA). Also see E. Reel, ‘‘Nature-Study and Gardening for Indian Schools,’’ Nature-Study Review 2 (April 1906): 141–43. 32Circular dated May 5, 1903, with the signature of A. E. Tonner, addressed to Agents and Superintendents. BIA, USNA. The superintendents typically met immediately after the National Education Association meetings for five days. Teachers were provided their normal salary during these classes but paid their own transportation and expenses. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 71 required to meet every fortnight to discuss books of educational significance; in 1902 the assigned texts included pamphlets by Liberty Hyde Bailey on garden making and Francis Parker on pedagogy.33 Reel perceived the gardens as closely allied with agriculture and reminded agents, superintendents, and principal teachers in a memorandum in the spring of 1902: ‘‘The work in nature study as laid down in the course of study should be prosecuted vigorously as this is the beginning of the more advantageous season of the work.’’34 Her five- page memorandum went on to detail plans for hot beds and cold frames, seed selection, preparations for planting, and organization of tools. Nothing in the circulars suggested attention to the natural history of plants, beautification of local schools, or an ecological outlook. The Indian students’ gardens were practical and didactic, explicitly to provide food for their schools and to establish character. Reel’s purposes were clear: ‘‘Garden work, properly directed, promotes industry, attention, judgment, skill and self-reliance.’’35 These were the goals of character building on a middle-class model and of skill building, with little room for self-expression or creative collaboration among the pupils. Federal day schools in the pueblos of Santa Fe, Santa Clara, and San Juan in New Mexico also included school gardens with similar goals.36 The vocabulary of nature study in these settings was quickly transformed into a kind of manual training for a life in crop farming, and, in the case of girls, domestic gardening.37 Similar patterns were evident at Hampton Institute in Virginia, which included both Native Americans and African-American students in teacher training classes and as pupils in the practice schools. Like Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Hampton introduced prospective teachers and their practice school pupils to nature study and school gardening (Figure 4). The stated goal was to teach effective farming

33Circular dated March 2, 1902, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIS), United States National Archives (USNA). 34Circulars dated March 12 and 19, 1904. BIA, USNM. 35Circular dated February 1, 1904. BIA, USNA. 36Descriptive records of the BIA, NARA Central Plains and Pacific Region facilities, USNA. On the vocational emphasis and ‘‘outing work’’ see Robert A. Tennert, Jr., The Phoenix Indian School: Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891–1935 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 69, 72–75. 37Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); chapter 6 on ‘‘Working for the School’’ underscores the vocationalism at Carlisle, PA and at Flandreau, SD. Also see Margaret L. Archuleta, Brenda J. Child, and K. TsianinaLomawaima, eds., Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879–2000 (Phoenix, AZ: Heard Museum, 2000); K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); and David W. Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995). 72 History of Education Quarterly

Figure 4. Some of the extensive grounds surrounding Hampton Institute in Virginia were put to use producing food for residents and the training of primary pupils. Both African American and Native American were enrolled in the Whittier School, a practice school for teachers in training. (Hampton University Archives and Museum) methods because administrators expected both teachers and their pupils in the training schools to remain in rural life.38 Philanthropists shared this vision, and Julius Rosenwald of Chicago, who provided regular support for Tuskegee Institute, offered to contribute half the salary of a hundred teachers to help ‘‘Negro children’’ learn home gardening in the South, provided that the Department of Education pay the other half.39 His grant was not fully spent, but joint funds were used for fourteen schools, including several in Virginia and others as far west as Lexington, KY and Chattanooga, TN.40 Southern public schools, generally underfunded compared with their counterparts elsewhere, had fewer school days and, it appears, only sporadically implemented nature study and school gardens. Asked about school garden training ‘‘further south,’’ for example, Bailey expressed puzzlement and responded that Lucy Wilson, a leading nature study

38See George Washington Carver, Nature Study and Children’s Gardens, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Leaflet #2 (1906). I thank Nina Lehrman for bringing this material to my attention. 39Rosenwald was interested in science and vocational education but response to this particular initiative was limited. Rosenwald also supported Tuskegee Institute and had provided funds to the black geneticist Everett Just; see Kenneth R. Manning, Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Everett Just (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 40P. P. Claxton to Rosenwald (who served on the Council of National Defense), April 19, 1919, Historical File, 1870–1959, Officer of the Commissioner of Education, USNA. The Commissioner’s office only allocated $3299.25 in fourteen cities and thus did not come close to the $25,000 offered by Rosenwald. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 73 educator in Philadelphia, might know more. He could only identify summer institutes sponsored by agricultural colleges in Charlottesville, VA; Knoxville, TN; and Athens, GA.41 One of the most widely noted examples of providing resources for gardening in the South was Nashville’s Seaman A. Knapp School of Country Life, established in 1913, a farm-based program to teach children applied agriculture.42 What evidence has been found to date on the southern schools suggests that they concentrated on the vocational aspects of school gardening under the auspices of special projects and patrons whose goal was to turn pupils into productive farmers. In the rest of the country, rural teachers and administrators experimented with ways to make schoolyard projects creative. These efforts coincided with a larger Country Life movement, initiated by President Theodore Roosevelt, which sought to emphasize the value of rural environments and to make country living more attractive.43 The fact that Liberty Hyde Bailey was named chair of Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission in 1908 and edited a report the following year that included discussion of education reinforced a connection between the two efforts; but school gardening was well under way by the time the commission was formed.44 The emphasis on the quality of country life encouraged farm extension agents to help teachers to complement the home gardens of their pupils by using gardening skills to establish a pleasant landscape. These became a legacy of trees, shrubs, and perennials that adorned sturdy one- and two-room buildings that would, in another generation, be largely abandoned.45 By the 1910s secondary vocational education in agriculture (as in mechanical arts) was installed in newly consolidated systems, which involved hand-on training with plants and livestock. Documentation for rural school gardens is elusive, scattered in records of villages and small towns and, perhaps for that reason, they have not been much studied. Urban

41L. H. Bailey to Ellen Taylor, March 11, 1907, Bailey papers, CUA. 42George Peabody College for Teachers, Division of Surveys and Field Services, Bulletin (1913). Knapp, a Union College graduate, had spent several years in Louisiana doing demonstration work with rice farming and embodied the goals of extension and outreach anticipated in this farm project. 43The best historical discussion remains William Bowen, The Country Life Movement in America (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974). For a contemporary overview that envisions the country school and country teacher ‘‘as regenerating forces for the new rural order,’’ see Mabel Carney, Country Life and the Country School: A Study of the Agencies of Rural Progress and of the Social Relationship of the School to the Country Community (Chicago: Row, Peterson, and Co., 1912), 327. 44Commission on Country Life, Report, ed. Liberty Hyde Bailey (U.S. Senate Document 705, 60th Congress, 2nd session, 1909); it was privately published with an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt in New York by Sturgis and Walton Co., 1911. 45Wayne E. Fuller, The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 218–45. 74 History of Education Quarterly school gardening projects, which garnered considerable media attention and left records of their work, have received more attention from historians.

‘‘Not Good Gardens But Good Gardeners’’ Urban school gardens were under considerable local scrutiny, and so, although not picturesque with unusual botanical specimens or landscaping, they needed to be aesthetically pleasing, or at least practical. Teachers were told to use the gardens as part of their classroom program in order to engage children’s own efforts in demonstrating the practical elements of growing flowers and vegetables. While country children typically enjoyed a mixed landscape of cultivars and wild species of plants and animals, children in larger cities had limited access to living nature. The demographics of overcrowded schools, immigrants speaking other languages, and rising crime rates fueled considerable anxiety among school board members and administrators, many of whom had farm or small town backgrounds. Enthusiastic supporters were drawn to the promise of school gardens not only as a way to better implement nature study but also to ameliorate social and economic problems faced by their pupils through hands on work with living things that might provide them with a fresh outlook on their environment. The stated goal was necessarily pedagogical in locations where students could not earn a living at farming and thus emphasized ‘‘not good gardens but good gardeners.’’46 Over time the expectations imposed on school gardens became ever more elaborate, moving them from being adjuncts to nature study toward programs expected to build a stronger civic society where citizens thought of the larger good and learned cooperative habits. The economic depression following the Panic of 1893 was especially evident in crowded cities where immigrants and rural in- migrants could not find work to feed their families. In Detroit Mayor Hazen Pingree inaugurated a vacant lot program, dubbed ‘‘Pingree Potato Patches’’ and the model for individual garden plots quickly spread to other cities.47 In Philadelphia, the Vacant Lots Cultivation Association assisted inner-city poor with mechanical

46Cyril A. Stebbins, ‘‘Growing Children in California Gardens,’’ Nature-Study Review 7 (February 1912): 67–74. 47Laura Jeanne Lawson, ‘‘Urban-Garden Programs in the United States: Values, Resources, and Role in Community Development’’ (PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2002). Lawson devotes a chapter to these efforts, pages 92–137, and notes they are an early official intervention to solve problems of unemployment and urban poverty. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 75 preparation of small gardens, grants of seeds and fertilizer, and instruction.48 These adult projects were only indirectly related to the school garden movement, and most children’s programs retained an emphasis on learning rather than producing. At the National Education Association meeting in 1898, Jenny Merrill of New York described how poorer inner-city children had been taught a variety of skills and became more attached to the school system through participation in garden programs provided by summer out-of-door initiatives in Chicago, St. Louis, Worcester, and New York.49 Individual vacation schoolteachers, like Beulah Douglas of Milwaukee, described their efforts as experimental. Douglas’s popular projects varied from year to year, and she argued that ‘‘this elasticity is of great value, for when methods become cut and dried, growth ceases.’’50 The school gardening experiment worked so well that by the turn of the century architects planning new city schools in Milwaukee were required to include plots for gardens alongside playgrounds.51 In New York City, Nicholas Murray Butler, the ambitious president of Columbia University, envisioned the product of such urban efforts, as ‘‘miniature yeomen.’’ His catalogue of potential outcomes suggested that an active garden program encouraged industriousness, skills, and self- reliance; taught orderliness, cleanliness, and punctuality; excited esthetic sensibility; and prevented moral degenerationFapparently characteristics he found wanting among city residents in New York’s slum neighborhoods.52 While their goals may have been less lofty and certainly less patronizing, parents and neighbors in crowded cities

48Vacant Lot Cultivation Association, Annual Report of 1910 (pamphlet); its motto was ‘‘Increased Opportunity for Self-Help.’’ This and a number of other pamphlet reports relating to city garden programs are found in the Historical File, 1870–1950, Box 14, Records of the Office of the Commissioner of Education (OCE), Department of the Interior, USNA. Also see Andrew W. Crawford to L. H. Bailey, January 21, 1904, Bailey Papers, CUA. 49Jennie B. Merrill, supervisor of kindergartens in New York City, wrote to John Spencer on April 27, 1898, that ‘‘Children’s Gardens’’ were to be her topic at the New York State Teachers’ Associations and the National Education Association. She noted that her kindergartens have ‘‘small box gardens but out-of-door gardens are appropriate for smaller cities.’’ Within a few years New YorkCity would have school gardens and even a school garden farm. Spencer Extension Education Papers, CUA; also Merrill, ‘‘Children’s Gardens’’ Proceedings and Addresses (NEA, 1898), 598. 50Quoted in Reese, Power and Promise of School Reform, 152. 51Henry S. Curtis surveyed ‘‘Vacation Schools, Playgrounds, and Recreational Centers,’’ in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Education, NYC 1 (1902–03): 2– 7. Curtis noted that the vacation work was, in nearly every case he studied, started by philanthropic groups, mostly comprised of women. Typically the women paid for the teachers and materials and the school board provided the building for free, although eventually municipalities took over the full funding. 52William A. Bullough, Cities and Schools in the Gilded Age: The Evolution of an Urban Institution (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974), 104. 76 History of Education Quarterly responded positively to the promise of programs that might make their schools safe, sanitary, and attractive with public playgrounds shaded by trees and adorned by flower gardens.53 The rationale for using gardens and out-of-door work often suggested both the problem and a set of solutions with broad ambitions. Sarah Louise Arnold, who supervised nature study in the primary schools in Boston in the mid-1890s, sought to offset the ‘‘barrenness’’ of ‘‘lives destined to drudgery’’ of her urban chargesF one of whom had asked permission to recite ‘‘There’s an old dude left on the daisies and clover’’Fwith exposure to natural life found in parks, developed on school grounds, and encouraged as part of their home life.54 This ideal coupled with the philanthropic spirit of late nineteenth-century Bostonians led the TwentiethCentury Club to hire five teachers to oversee vacation gardens under A. L. Withington, while the Massachusetts Civil League developed 235 gardens with playgrounds in collaboration with the Women’s Auxiliary of the American Park and Outdoor Association and the Boston Park Commission.55 There was often an impressive mix of private charities and civic groups that provided support for the myriad of urban reform efforts that coordinated summer vacation programs, settlement house activities, and playgrounds into public school systems.56 In Cleveland, for example, the garden movement began in the Goodrich Social Settlement. An active Home Gardening Association cooperated with the city’s Slavic Alliance to sell seeds to school-aged children for use in their own yards and neighborhoods. The money from the sale of seeds paid for circulars and prizes awarded to the best student gardeners.57 One goal was to help students become fiscally responsible. Pupils were encouraged, for example, to sell their products at the end of the season and calculate how much profit they had made. Soon the Cleveland school system taught nature study along with general principles of successful garden management. About 1905 its school board hired Louise Klein Miller as full-time curator of school grounds and gardens in an effort to extend these programs throughout

53William J. Reese, ‘‘Between Home and School: Organized Parents, Clubwomen, and Urban Education in the Progressive Era.’’ School Review 87 (November 1978): 16–17. 54‘‘Nature Study in City Schools,’’ American Primary Teacher (June 1899) in Scrapbook 4, Arnold Papers, Simmons College Archives, Boston. 55Trelstad, ‘‘Little Machines,’’ 22. 56Curtis, ‘‘Vacation Schools, Playgrounds, and Settlements,’’ 2–7; John Leslie Randall, Nature Study and the City Child (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Playground Association, 1912). 57Lucy C. Buell, ‘‘Home Gardens in Cleveland.’’ Nature-Study Review 3 (February 1907): 38; also discussed in Trelstad, ‘‘Little Machines,’’ 17–20. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 77 the city.58 Miller’s coordinated programs became nationally recognized and the efficient Cleveland School Flower Mission distributed seeds to schools in other cities as well.59 These nearby activities inspired John H. Patterson, head of the National Cash Register Company, to set aside company land for his employees’ children and others in the neighborhood near his factory.60 Ontario nature-study advocates, noting the success of the programs across Lake Erie, especially in upstate New York and Ohio, developed school garden programs in Torontoand in rural areas throughout the province, emphasizing school practices that would improve home gardens.61 It took less time and money to encourage home projects than to create gardens on school sites.62 Even window boxes were sufficient to lead discussions of germination and nutrition.63 Clara Cooper reported in 1905 that in the moderate-sized city of Omaha, NE the connection was readily made: ‘‘From the school gardens and window boxes has grown the desire for home gardens, and more than one child has been provided by his teachers with the means to start such a garden.’’64 In Worcester, MA, too, students were given seeds to be used at home, and the supervisor observed with evident surprise that ‘‘boys and girls are

58Sixth Annual Report of the Home Gardening Association (Cleveland, 1905). Louise Miller discussed her methods in Children’s Gardens for School and Home: A Manual of Co- Operative Gardening (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904). She is likely the same Louise Miller who produced A Course in Nature Study for the Public Schools for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, Bulletin 63 (1900) and wrote ‘‘The Civic Aspect of School Gardens.’’ Nature-Study Review 8 (February 1912): 74–77. 59R. L. Templin,ed., Information and Suggestions on School Gardens, Children’s Home Gardens, Junior Clean-up Work and How to Make Your Home and Community a More Desirable Place to Live (Cleveland: The Children’s Flower Mission, 1915). The claim that over twenty-one thousand schools had used ‘‘penny packet seeds’’ from the Children’s Flower Mission is from an advertisement in The Third Annual Report of the School Garden Association of America, Meeting with the National Education Association (n.p., 1914), 14. 60See Lawson, ‘‘Urban-Garden Programs,’’ 195–97. This program was one of the few that seemed to be for boys only. 61S. B. McCready, Gardening for Schools, Ontario Agriculture College, Bulletin no. 152 (December 1906), 28–29. McCready subsequently moved to Prince Edward Island, and by 1914 he and Canadian educators from British Columbia, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and Quebec were on the roster of nearly 800 members of the School Garden Association of America listed in The Fourth Annual Report of the School Garden Association of America (n.p., 1915), 49–57. 62Wilbur Jackman sent a questionnaire home with pupils for parents to indicate how much space they could establish for a small home garden correlated with the gardening activities at the school; see Elementary School Teacher 36 (1902–03): 528–29. 63See Course of Study in Nature Study and Agriculture (Bismarck, ND: Department of Public Instruction, 1923), found in the extensive curriculum collection at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, New York(TC). Given the diverse geographical conditions of the state, the course outlines emphasized the need to find good local materials. 64Annual Report of the Board of Education for the Omaha Public Schools (South Omaha: Magic Printing Co., 1905). 78 History of Education Quarterly about equally divided in their choice of flowers and vegetables.’’65 Here, as elsewhere, initiatives expanded under innovative teachers. The Worcester Social Settlement, for example, transformed a vacant ‘‘Dead Cat Dump’’ into a ‘‘Garden City’’ that featured streets and squares complemented by a political structure with students serving as mayor, police force, and commissioners of gardens, tools, and water. The school supervisor reported a reduction in local juvenile crime and an improving health rate in the ‘‘Island District’’ of this industrial city, home to at least twenty-two nationalities.66 In Minneapolis the Women’s Improvement League assisted with window boxes and garden programs.67 In neighboring St. Paul, a collaborative summer school garden program initiated in 1908 grew from four gardens to nine gardens the following year.68 Intended to provide a ‘‘pleasant place for children who must remain in the city during the summer,’’ the visible gardens garnered widespread and diverse support. The children’s gardens were developed on vacant lots provided by the city while the St. Paul Pioneer Press paid to plow and harrow the plots. Seeds came from the Sunbeam Band, while the Ladies’ Thursday Club provided a gardener to assist the children for three months and the school board paid for fencing to keep out pests and other intruders. Students had small individual plots and took their produce home to use or sell. Nature study director Dietrich Lange noted with evident approval that the enterprising children in St. Paul preferred vegetables to flowers, although they often planted both.69 This complex mix of corporate, city, voluntary, and school funding was a familiar feature of school garden activity in urban programs across the country. Perhaps ironically, the garden program in the city of Washington, DC languished without any appropriation from Congress, its political overseer, instead relying on piecemeal monies from other parts of the school budget and private donations.70

65Edna R. Thayer, ‘‘Children’s Gardens at Dowling St. School, Worcester, Massachusetts.’’ Nature-Study Review 1 (March 1905): 63. Gardening persisted in Worcester, see Breta W. Childs, ‘‘The Need for Gardening as an Intermediate Grade Subject in City Schools.’’ Nature-Study Review 19 (February 1923): 79–82. 66R.J. Floody, ‘‘Worcester Garden City Plan; or, The Good Citizen Factory.’’ Nature-Study Review 8 (April 1912): 145–50. 67Annual Report of the Board of Education of the City of Minneapolis for the Year 1873 (Minneapolis, 1874). 68A summary of the program indicates that there were twenty gardens by 1916 under a year-round Supervisor of Gardening; Alfred Perkins, School Gardening in St. Paul, Minnesota (n.p., 1916). 69Unpublished paper ‘‘School Gardens’’ by Dietrich Lange in his papers at the Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN. 70Susan B. Sipe of the Washington Normal School to L. H. Bailey, January 19 and February 29, 1907, Bailey Papers, CUA. For a somewhat more upbeat assessment of the demonstration program, see Lawson, ‘‘Urban-Garden Programs,’’ 198–200. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 79

New York City invested deeply in school gardening while also relying on private participation. Under Fannie Griscom Parsons, the DeWitt Clinton Park garden program in conjunction with the Juvenile Agricultural School provided four-by-twelve-foot ‘‘farms’’ for neighborhood pupils.71 The city’s school nature study supervisor Gustave Straubenmueller echoed Nicholas Murray Butler’s assertion that gardens provided moral training, physical welfare, and observational skills and were thus an important aspect of nature study.72 In an effort to expand the voluntary sponsorship, he established a local School Garden Association in 1908 that coordinated adult volunteers to lobby for city and state support. In Yonkers,the Civic League of Women’sInstitute established the Fairview Garden Association to provide resources in local tenements. Its 1909 report was yet another collaboration, published by the New York Department of Child Hygiene with funds from the Russell Sage Foundation. Such public–private partnership was typical of many gardening efforts, but the lack of a single sustained sponsor meant funding was unpredictable from year to year.73 Most programs were aimed directly at children, but Alice Rich Northrup coordinated teaching alumnae of Hunter College, where she had taught botany for several years.74 An active naturalist, Northrup found from experience that school visits to assist teachers with their nature study and gardening efforts were inefficient.75 Instead, she developed field trips for groups of teachers on Wednesdays and Saturdays, using the train and trolley to visit sites in New Jersey and greater New York.76 She worked closely with Straubenmueller and a

71Fannie Griscom Parsons directed the Juvenile Agricultural School in DeWitt Clinton Park in Manhattan; the school hosted area teachers who used four-by-twelve foot ‘‘farms’’ for their pupils. See her report in The First Children’s Farm School in New York City (New York:DeWitt Clinton Farm School, 1903) and , ‘‘A Day in Children’s School Farm in New York City.’’ Nature-Study Review 1 (November 1905): 255–61. 72Gustave Straubenmueller, ‘‘The Work of the New York Schools for the Immigrant Class.’’ Journal of Social Sciences 44 (1906): 165–83. 73See A. L. Livermore, School Garden: Report of the Fairview Garden Association, Yonkers, New York (New York: Department of Child Hygiene, 1910). The estimated cost for tools and salaries of staff during the garden season (seeds and fertilizer and other items) was nearly $5,000 a year. 74See Alice R. Northrup, ‘‘Flower Shows in City Schools.’’ Nature-Study Review 1 (May 1905): 104–9. Northrup was at that time a lecturer in botany and nature study at the city normal school; her article outlined the early efforts of the committee in New York. 75Diary entry for May 9, 1915. Northrop Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA (SLR). 76She started these in the 1890s, using Cornell leaflets; Northrup to Spencer, December 8, 1897; also Northrop’s ‘‘Wanamaker Date Book’’ for a number of years from 1907 to 1914, has inserts of ‘‘Nature-Study Class’’ excursions and lists of the almost exclusively women (usually about eighteen to twenty-five) attendees. Northrop Papers, SLR. 80 History of Education Quarterly well-connected family friend, Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.77 In 1917, Northrup organized a broad-based School Nature League whose goal was to take more projects indoors by having students to grow plants in the classrooms and incorporating nature rooms into Manhattan public schools.78 Osborn (named honorary president of the group) accommodated its members with space for a model Nature Room in the new educational wing of the museum, reminding his board that the study of nature brought ‘‘material, economic, and utilitarian’’ lessons to children.79 Enthusiastic teachers claimed that gardens encouraged their pupils’ self-expression and taught cooperation among them as they selected seeds, designed plots, and shared tools. Despite considerable regimentation in large urban programs, most teachers modified standardized lesson plans to accommodate pupil initiatives and reward their work. Thus teacher Florence Lillie recommended colorful flowers and crops that grew quickly in order to bring gratification to young pupils.80 City and state botanical gardens could be an important resource, offering advice, materials, and destinations for school field trips. Women’s clubs and other community groups viewed school gardening enterprises as an opportunity to exercise influence and benevolence.81 Garden club women were particularly optimistic about the ways that picturesque nature that had inspired poets could provide spiritual healing and might arouse aesthetic sensibilities.82 Success stories abounded. In Philadelphia the director of a gardening program reported the

77Alice Northrup to Henry Fairfield Osborn, December n.d., 1918, Osborn Papers, American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Osborn had helped Northrup edit A Naturalist in the Bahamas, written by Alice and her husband John Northrup before his death in a laboratory accident at Columbia School of Mines. 78Northrop was a well-respected botanist in her own right, having done field work in Central and North America and the Caribbean; she moved in 1919 to Great Barrington, MA, where the Northrop Memorial Camp is now located. Northrop Papers, SLR. 79Henry F.Osborn to Alice Northrop, December 20 and 26, 1918, Osborn Papers, AMNH. Florida Wiley was for many years the well-loved teacher coordinator at the American Museum. Also see records of the School Nature League, Teachers College Archive, Columbia University (TC). 80Florence E. Lillie, Course in Nature-Study for Elementary Grades of Minnesota Public Schools (Minneapolis: Syndicate Print, 1901), 5. 81Reese, The Power and Promise of School Reform, 151–62. On the public interest in supporting nature study also see Martha Van Rensselaer to L. H. Bailey, Bailey Papers, CUA, and Karen Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True WomanhoodRedefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1980). 82The school gardens got considerable attention from weekly magazines; for example, C. S. Sargent , ‘‘A Garden for Children.’’ Garden and Forest 10 (April 21, 1897): 151–52. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 81 touching account of ‘‘Eleanor P.’’ who lived in the ‘‘poorest house’’ on the ‘‘worst street’’ of a squalid section:

Her garden consisted of a box of soil on a chair. Calliopsis plants were given her from the school garden. Twiceher father threw them out. TwiceEleanor secured new plants from the teacher. Then the cats knocked over the box. y Finally after seven accidents the Calliopsis plants were allowed to grow in peace, thriving to Eleanor’s joy. Surely she was entitled to be proud of the healthy Calliopsis she brought to the fall exhibit.83

Eleanor’s opportunity came through a program to provide summer supervision and recreation for children, often immigrants, in inner-city slums while both parents worked. Administrative and philanthropic enthusiasms did not inevitably gain like-minded response from teachers, who understandably found that school gardens were too often ‘‘voluntary’’ expansions of their responsibilities that added considerable labor to their already heavy teaching loads. When Corrine Seeds taught in a county school near Los Angeles, she found that upper grade children were assigned plots ten feet wide and thirty feet long: ‘‘See what I got myself into! Fifty-six children with that many gardens! Well, I didn’t know much about agriculture, nor [sic] much about the Japanese method of ditching, but I learned it.’’84 Perhaps partly in self-defense, teachers involved in school gardening joined together in garden associations in New York City in 1908 and Boston in 1910.85 Nature-Study Review contributed to the movement by publishing special issues on school gardens in April of 1910 and again in February of 1912 where teachers could share their experiences. Local mutual-help groups combined into a national School Garden Association of America (SGA) in 1912 (Figure 4).86 Its leadership coordinated with the American Nature-Study Society (founded in 1908), providing joint membership at reduced rates. A

83Annual Report of School Garden Activities (Philadelphia, 1915), 8. Caro Miller, the director, said that his program recruited teachers from Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women eager to help with these programs. 84Corrine Aldine Seeds, ‘‘Uses of the History of a Creative Elementary School’’ (typescript oral history), in the University of California at Los Angeles Archives. She subsequently ran an Americanization Center and Socialized Evening School for the Los Angeles public schools before taking an MA in supervision from Teachers College Columbia and becoming head of the UCLA elementary practice school. 85Van Evrie Kilpatrick, The School Garden: A Laboratory of Nature (New York: School Garden Association, 1940), 12. 86School Garden Association, Fourth Annual Report (1915), 10. Also involved were the School Garden Committee of the Society of American Florists, the Garden Department of the National Congress of Mothers, and various Parent–Teacher Associations. 82 History of Education Quarterly

‘‘department’’ of school gardening in the latter society insured that the topic would be regularly covered in its monthly Review. The SGA also met annually with the National Educational Association in order to promote its goal of ‘‘open air classrooms.’’87 The state and local associations spent much of their time lobbying government agencies to insure that supplies were available and to provide teachers with payment for their overtime work.88 By 1918 the national School Garden Association boasted members in every state and Canadian province. What may have been most critical in advancing school gardens, however, was the advocacy of numerous city, state, and federal agencies, which provided support of various kinds, including publications highlighting problems that school gardens were intended to ameliorate. A pamphlet published by the New York Department of Education in 1917 complained,

[O]ur efforts to lay out public parks and private gardens have proved inad- equate to reach vast numbers of children who grow up in an environment from which the charm and beauty of nature are absolutely barred. The sordid panorama of our city streets pours its pernicious influence into the very soul of the rising generation during the most impressionable years, until the sense of beauty and naturalness is stunted and the garishness of city scenes is pre- ferred to the gentle charm of nature’s offering.89

This criticism was followed by specific suggestions about how school gardens could turn empty lots and household back yards into flourishing spaces that would change not only the neighborhood but also the circumstances and outlook of tenement children.90 With intermingled private and public support, gardens on school grounds in New York City grew from 59 in 1909 to 99 in 1925, and to 167 in 1928.91 The Child Welfare League agreed to pay a director to

87School Garden Association, Fourth Annual Report (1915), 10. This report claimed that ten thousand copies had been printed for distribution, sponsored by the Children’s Flower Mission of Cleveland. 88C.D. Jarvis, ‘‘What Shall be Our Policy Concerning Gardening in the Elementary City Schools?’’ Nature-Study Review 12 (April 1916): 174–78. The Bureau of Education staff member suggested that teachers might be hired for twelve months to help train children for home gardens. 89School Gardens for the Public Schools of New York City (New York: Department of Education, 1917), 3. 90The principal of PS 15 in Manhattan, Margaret Knox, described ‘‘The Best School Garden I Know’’ as one wedged into a previously vacant and overgrown space between two tenements in Nature-Study Review 12 (January 1916): 34–36. 91See summary in the ‘‘Report on School Gardens for 1945,’’ NYC Board of Education, Vertical File, Box 90, TC. The impact, however, was limited; Vernon Lantis suggested that less than 2 percent of the children were reached by the New York garden program in , ‘‘Some Criticisms of the Present Method in School Gardens.’’ Nature-Study Review 9 (September 1913): 186–90. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 83 supervise home and school gardens in the New York system. Van Evrie Kilpatrick, already active in the garden program, took the full-time position in 1917.92 Envisioning a transformation of the inner cities, he argued that school gardens were ‘‘the outdoor laboratory of nature teaching, particularly in a large city where the pupils come less and less in contact with nature.’’93 His activities supplemented those of the city’s Department of School Gardens and Elementary Agriculture, headed by Henry Parsons, who was also secretary of the privately sponsored International Children’s School Farm League.94 Between 1895 and 1915, garden projects became publicly visible symbols of tactile, active learning. Gardens, after all, produced tangible results from underutilized resources of idle time and vacant land.95 This was the argument made by Leroy Anderson of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Berkeley after he conducted an informal educational survey in California. While city and county superintendents listed nature study as part of their curriculum, the lessons were intermittent and scattered. Anderson argued that school gardens were more successful than general nature study because they were visible, collective, and systematic.96 Others found that nature study was not readily distinguishable from school gardening and the two were often intermingled, and in any case school gardening was widely implemented in California and elsewhere.97

92Undated report of Dr O’Shea on ‘‘School Gardens’’ in the NYC Board of Education, Vertical File, TC. Kilpatrick eventually worked directly for the Board of Education. 93He fretted that ‘‘The distances of the schools and the homes of the pupils from open spaces, parks, fields and meadows, and the dangers from heavy traffic, necessitate the bringing of nature to our pupils, or to some place where they can observe the growth and beauty in plant life, and learn to protect that life.’’ Van Evrie Kilpatrick, Supervisor of School Gardens, in Superintendent of Schools, New YorkCity, Annual Report (1924–25), 149. 94See Parsons’ reprinted talk to the International Children’s International School Farm League, ‘‘What the School Garden will Mean to the Children of the World,’’ Pamphlet 31, January 1912. 95Lawson, ‘‘Urban-Garden Programs in the United States,’’ 1. 96Anderson to L. H. Bailey, March 24, 1908, and reply, March 30, 1908, Bailey Papers, CUA. Materials were quickly forthcoming, including E. B. Babcock’s Suggestions for Garden Work in California Schools (Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 1909) and Clayton F.Palmer, Elementary Horticulture for California Schools: A Manual for Teachersand Amateur Gardeners (n.p., 1910). 97When the faculty at the State Normal School at Chico issued its first nature study bulletin, it was a pamphlet on School Gardens for California Schools, edited by Cyril A. Stebbins in 1909; he later produced The Principles of Agriculture through the School and Home Garden (New York:Macmillan Co., 1913). Benjamin Marshall Davis, School Gardens for California Schools: A Manual for Teachers, State Normal School, Chico, Bulletin 1 (July 1905). 84 History of Education Quarterly

Federal Advocates Federal administrators in both the Bureau of Education and the Department of Agriculture supported nature study, but the burgeoning school garden movement interested them more. While school gardens necessarily relied on local resources, both federal agencies sought to make exclusive claims about their initiatives and appropriate oversight. The well-funded Department of Agriculture had considerably more resources to recommend, but it could not actually mandate, programs through its network of agricultural grantees and extension programs.98 Until 1929 the Bureau of Education was a small part of the Department of the Interior, constrained financially by a widespread public outlook that insisted schooling be left to local control.99 Both agencies aspired to become the ‘‘leader’’ in the burgeoning national gardening movement, using their public franking privileges as federal agencies to publish and disseminate literature to a national audience. The Department of Agriculture viewed gardening as an extension of agricultural education, whether rural or urban. In 1908, Dick J. Crosby, special assistant for education in the Office of Experiment Stations, conducted a survey and reported that school garden programs were well established in twenty-one states.100 Federal attention to these programs, particularly at the high school level but reaching down toward elementary education, became more intense after the Smith– Hughes Act in 1908 endorsed and sponsored deliberately vocational agricultural education.101 The Department of Agriculture presented school gardens as its domain in a series of pamphlets produced in cooperation with International Harvester Company for use in agricultural extension programs. It eventually provided two acres of land next to its building on the Mall for school children in the District of Columbia to plant gardens, with some space designated for local

98Alfred C. True, A History of Agricultural Experimentation and Research in the United States 1607–1925, Including a History of the United States Department of Agriculture (Washington: GPO, 1937). 99Commissioner Philander P. Claxton, for example, often offered strong opinions about teacher training and educational practice but typically couched his comments to disavow any desire to ‘‘dictate local policy.’’ His correspondence is found in Historical File, Boxes 55–60, OCE, USNA. 100Dick Crosby, ‘‘Report on School Gardens,’’ Office of Experiment Stations, United States Department of Agriculture, Report, 1907, 573–84. 101G. F.Ekstrom, Historical Development of Agricultural Education in the United States Prior to 1917 (Washington: US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1969) and Wayne E. Fuller, ‘‘Making Better Farmers: The Study of Agriculture in Midwestern Country Schools, 1900–1923.’’ Agricultural History 60 (Spring 1986): 154–68. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 85 teachers in training to practice greenhouse work and scientific principles of crop raising.102 The Bureau of Education, which had already established nature study and gardens in the Indian schools, also took a highly visible stance, commissioning a report from Clark University graduate James Ralph Jewell entitled Agricultural Education Including Nature Study and School Gardens in 1907. Produced as a bulletin of the Department of the Interior, it argued that school gardens offered remedies to an array of rural social ills, economic problems, and diseases. Jewell also claimed that elementary nature study and agriculture had a positive impact on the social and economic lives of Indian and African-American students, and this influence could extend to ‘‘unruly, vagrant, and vicious boys’’ in the city as well.103 Jewell estimated there were more than 75,000 school gardens across the country in 1906. Within a few years the Bureau of Education created a Division of Home and School Gardening.104 The Commissioner of Education’s survey in 1916, reported by C. D. Jarvis, described the range of programs in his division and indicated that more than 50 percent of the schools in cities with more than five thousand inhabitants had a school garden program in place. Rural projects were also promoted by Jarvis, who assumed that farms were good places to raise children and that agrarianism was the bedrock of American citizenship.105 The Bureau of Education produced a series of School Home-Garden Circulars on such topics as ‘‘Gardening Projects in Seed Planting’’ (December 1916) and ‘‘Flower Growing for School Children in the Elementary Grades’’ (January 1917).106 Through pamphlet literature and regular reports, both agencies implied that this national movement was taking its direction from Washington, through extension agents and educational recommendations. Such federal efforts were, however, sporadic and largely reportorial until the United States began mobilizing for war. Using themes of

102Susan Sipe, ‘‘School Gardening at the National Capital.’’ Elementary School Teacher 8 (1905-1906): 417–19, plus illustrations. 103James Ralph Jewell, ‘‘The Place of Nature Study, School Gardens, and Agriculture in Our School System.’’ Pedagogical Seminary 13 (September 1906): 173– 292; quotation from page 279. See his report, ‘‘Agricultural Education Including Nature Study and School Gardens,’’ Department of Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin 2, no. 368 (1907). 104The formation, which was made possible by a special appropriation by Congress, was announced in a gardening issue of Nature-Study Review 11 (February 1915), 43. 105R. L. Templin,ed., Information and Suggestions on School Gardens, Children’s Home Gardens, Junior Clean-up Work, and How to Make Your Home and Community a More Desirable Place to Live (Cleveland: The Children’s Flower Mission, 1915), 33. 106Leaflets found at in a box labeled ‘‘Nature Study Pamphlets,’’ Mann Library, Cornell University. 86 History of Education Quarterly rationing, increasing food production, and contributing to the war effort, Washington administrators encouraged local initiatives to produce agricultural products, and schools provided an important conduit for funneling information into communities and homes. Moreover, the school gardening movement had created a network of institutional supports that could be mobilized for the war effort. The effort to initiate and expand school gardens also made visible growing tension in Washington between the Bureau of Education and the Department of Agriculture over who should wield more influence at the nexus of science, agriculture, and vocational education.

United States School Garden Army World War I brought an unprecedented surge in the school gardening movement.107 By 1917, school gardens had been well identified with character-building traits and the civic values of their local communities. Thus promoting gardens through youth organizations, sometimes organized through the schools, was relatively straightforward.108 Boy Scout leaders, who already stressed patriotic slogans and military-like hierarchies, argued that boys too young to serve in the military could help produce food on the home front. The Scouts’ pamphlet Every Scout to Feed a Soldier included letters of support from Herbert Hoover, chair of the National Food Commission, and Alfred C. True of the Department of Agriculture. Corporate sponsors became part of the war initiative, including the Society of American Florists, which distributed its own free leaflet on ways to create school gardens.109 However, when Commissioner of Education Philander P. Claxton began to issue literature encouraging school gardens as part of the war effort in early 1918, an Assistant Secretary of Agriculture reacted strongly to intrusion on his turf: ‘‘It would be unthinkable for the

107School gardens were just one part of multifaceted efforts to engage children in the war on the home front. These included gathering clothing for relief of children in France and Belgium, collecting fruit pits to be used in gas masks, selling thrift stamps and war savings bonds, and preparing surgical dressings and other items for soldiers. See, for example, ‘‘A Brief Memorandum Regarding War Work and War Relief’’ in the public schools of New York City prepared for Anning S. Prall, n.d., NYC Board of Education, Vertical File on WW I, TC. 108‘‘United States School Garden Army’’ Bureau of Education, Department of the Interior, vol. 4, no. 24, pointed out that ‘‘school-supervised gardening has already become an integral part of the school curriculum in most of the States’’ and this new effort can help build ‘‘a patriotic and Americanizing impulse.’’ NYC Board of Education, Vertical File 422, TC. 109Leaflet found in Historical File, Boxes 55–60, OCE, USNA. Newspaper clippings and press releases also calculated that over a million young people had cultivated thirty thousand acres of formerly nonproductive land, and produced $15 million worth of food. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 87

Department of Agriculture to institute any activity concerning public education without suggestion or approval from the Department of Interior, and I cannot help thinking that Bureau of Education should hesitate to undertake any agricultural activity without the suggestion or approval of the Department of Agriculture.’’110 Moreover, he argued, the Department of Agriculture and agricultural colleges were surely the best source of information about practical aspects of gardening. Eventually the two agencies reached an uneasy truce, after which garden publications listed both Claxton and Franklin K. Lane, the secretary of the Interior, as the administrative officials of the newly constituted United States School Garden Army. Charles Lathrop Pack was named president of the National War Garden Commission and began to produce posters, press releases, and literature on victory gardens in connection with this new project (Figure 5).111 Students who ‘‘enlisted’’ were to be given an insignia (an army insignia of blue on a white field with a red border) with patterns to indicate rank. Maintaining the military analogy, every school was urged to have its own regiment. An original allocation of $50,000 from the Smith–Lever Extension Act of 1914, which formalized agricultural extension education, proved insufficient for this project, so wartime President Woodrow Wilson added another $200,000 from the National Security and Defense Fund. Wilson wrote an encouraging letter for the School Garden Army suggesting ‘‘every boy and girl y would like to feel that they are in fact fighting in France by joining the home garden army’’ and concluding that the movement to have children establish and maintain gardens ‘‘is just as real and patriotic an effort as the building of ships or the firing of cannon.’’112 The appeal was not simply to American self- sufficiency because the literature also pointed out that if all the children of the country participated, their efforts would free sufficient commercial produce to feed the hungry children in occupied Belgium. The original five regional directors of the School Garden Army included Cyril Stebbins, who gave up his post teaching nature study at the Normal School at Chico, CA. Eventually nineteen regional directors were appointed with the standard assignment to get every child active in planting and cultivating at least one food plant in the ‘‘spirit of patriotism

110Assistant Secretary of Agriculture to Claxton, March 23, 1918, Historical File, 1870–1950, Box 43, OCE, USNA. 111Pack produced a pamphlet entitled Victory Gardens Feed the Hungry (n.p., n.d.) as well as a record book for girls and boys to record their daily garden activities. He also wrote The War Garden Victorious: Its Wartime Need and Its Economic Value in Peace (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1919). Available at: http://www.earthlypursuits.com/ WarGarV/WarGardTitle.htm (February 19, 2004). 112The Fall Manual of the United States School Garden Army (n.d.), 5. The motto was ‘‘A Garden for Every Child. Every Child in a Garden.’’ 88 History of Education Quarterly

Figure 5. Prominent artists became involved in the propaganda efforts for recruiting to the ‘‘school army’’ during World War I, including Edward Penfield, who designed this poster and several others. Permission from War Poster Collection, Manuscripts Division, Uni- versity of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 89 and service.’’113 The Bureau took responsibility for working with elementary school children in the School Garden Army, while older children participated through the Department of Agriculture’s School Garden Army or its Boys’ and Girls’ Garden Clubs. A report issued during the summer of 1918 claimed that a million and a half children had ‘‘enlisted’’ in the effort to build school and home gardens.114 Advocacy and propaganda came from many quarters. American Forestry, for example, stressed that Germany had very successful civilian projects and that with two million men under arms and a need to feed a large part of Europe, the war gardens in the United States must do even better.115 Not everyone was pleased with the School Garden Army concept. Harvard’s former president Charles W. Eliot, who initially had strong pacifist leanings, decried the school garden movement as building on ‘‘hysteria and gross exaggeration.’’ He particularly took issue with a statement by Woodrow Wilson that children would ‘‘all like to feel that they are in fact fighting in France by joining the home garden army.’’ This former Civil War veteran stated adamantly, ‘‘They are not.’’116 Promotion continued unabated from Washington, however. Newspapers nationwide covered the national and local garden army stories. Nature writers provided children’s stories to the press, such as Katharine Whipple Dobbs’ account of even lowly worms contributing to the soil to support young seedlings; these stories strove to teach something of nature and a moral lesson as well.117 Secretary Lane lobbied successfully for volunteer assistance and sponsorship from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Chambers of Commerce, Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs, and other national civic groups with strong local chapters.118 Wartime gardens, of course, were built on the success of school garden programs already mandated by local or state

113This information is taken from a number of undated memoranda and loose sheets, probably written as press releases, in Historical Files, 1870–1950, OCE, USNA. The original five regional directors are listed at the front of the Fall Manual of the United States School Garden Army (Washington: Department of the Interior and Bureau of Education, Government Printing Office, 1918), namely Clarence M. Weed, Frederick A. Merrill, Lester S. Ivins, Cyril A. Stebbins, and John L. Randall. They each produced Courses in School-Supervised Gardening for first through sixth graders in their region published by the Bureau of Education in 1919. 114Undated memorandum in Historical Files, 1870–1950, Box 43, OCE, USNA. 115American Forestry 23 (October 1917): 599. 116Italics in original. Eliot to P. P. Claxton, April 18 and April 27, 1918, Historical File, 1870–1950, OCE, USNA. 117Her stories and many other accounts are found in a large scrapbook of School Garden Army newspaper clippings, Historical File, 1870–1950, OCE, USNA. 118Undated memoranda sent to such groups pointed out that the School Garden Army wanted to recruit nine- to fourteen-year-olds and argued that a successful effort would displace more than $250 million in market produce that could then be used for the soldiers in battle. Historical File, 1870–1950, OCE, USNA. 90 History of Education Quarterly boards. Advocates emphasized root crops with food value rather than radishes or other quick growing crops that had been popular in prewar gardens.119 A large scrapbook kept by the Commissioner of Education was filled with newspaper clippings from across the continental United States and beyond to Hawaii and the Philippines. The publicity suggested that local politicians, teachers, and parents supported the program with financial resources, prizes, and public accolades for achievement.120

Scaling Down Charles Pack continued to encourage victory gardens after the war, but the momentum had dissipated and postwar fatigue setting in as the nation struggled economically.121 A special issue of Nature-Study Review that highlighted successful garden projects concluded that ‘‘readjustments that always follow wars have dealt harshly in some places with school gardens.’’122 Public sponsorship had brought ever more expansive expectations. In 1916 one advocate produced a long list of potential outcomes:

Totrain children in habits of thrift and industry; to develop stronger-bodied children; to make it possible for children to remain longer in school and to escape the evils attending early confinement in shops, mills, and mines; to make it possible for children to contribute to the support of the family while attending school and to convince parents that it is worthwhile for children to continue their school work, boys and girls should be provided interesting, wholesome and remunerative employment at an early age, and while attending school. Tosupply these needs for the benefit of children in towns and cities there is no more available means than that offered by productive gardening.123

Such ambitions could not be met by a single program. It is evident, too, that parents and teachers welcomed a return to standard subjects in the

119Susan Sipe Alburtis, ‘‘War and the School Garden.’’ Nature-Study Review 14 (March 1918): 124. 120The scrapbook is in the Historical File, OCE, USNA. 121The ongoing influence of the SGA was evident in Anna Botsford Comstock’s edited series of ‘‘Reports from Garden Supervisors.’’ Nature-Study Review 16 (March 1920): 123–129. The Department of Agriculture also presented helpful information in its anonymously authored announcement, ‘‘Lantern Slide Sets Loaned by the United States Government.’’ Nature-Study Review 15 (March 1919): 107. Lathrop’s The War Garden Victorious is now an e-book at www.earthlypursuits.com/WarGarV (Accessed August 1, 2005). 122, ‘‘Editorial: The School Garden Outlook.’’ Nature-Study Review 17 (March 1921): 142, and Adelaide Derringer, ‘‘Symposium of Garden Supervisors from Coast to Coast.’’ Nature-Study Review 17 (March 1921): 103–20. 123Jarvis, ‘‘What Shall be Our Policy?’’ 175. The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 91 postwar period that sought broader outcomes from education than an emphasis on food production.124 The movement had reached its apex during the war. In the 1920s school gardening had varied success. Philadelphia, which had pioneered in school gardens, abandoned them, while Cleveland reinvested in its program. The New York School Garden Association worked hard to maintain its early momentum, launching a Nature-Garden Guide in 1920, edited by long-standing advocate Van Evrie Kilpatrick. In 1924, his New York program claimed 117 school gardens involving more than 150,000 pupils with 46 acres under cultivation.125 His monthly newsletter listed numerous opportunities for children and teachers to attend lectures on nature, visit flower and mineral shows, participate in Arbor Day, and plan a Nature Room.126 The General Federation of Women’s Clubs continued to promote gardening for urban schools and encouraged the Bureau of Education to produce a school garden bulletin in 1925 that included a course outline by nature study educator Elliott R. Downing.127 Perceptions varied about the garden programs, but Lenore Conover in Detroit was only thinking locally when she reported in 1927 that, ‘‘school gardens are increasing in number as an outgrowth of nature study.’’128 Discussions of large outdoor gardens became less frequent, but indoor plant projects and smaller outdoor projects by and for children remained evident throughout the Depression and a new, short-term gardening movement emerged during World War II.129

124The move toward traditional subject matter and away from techniques like gardening is discussed in Kim Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2003), and the more general shift is discussed in Wayne J. Urban and Jennings L. Wagoner, Jr., American Education: A History (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004), chapter 8. 125Superintendent of Schools, New York City, Annual Report for 1924–25, 271. Kilpatrick argued that an urban child knew nothing of nature and was ‘‘denuded of his natural heritage’’ unless introduced to nature itself in Nature Education in the Cities of the United States (New York: School Garden Association, 1923), 7. 126Plans for building a Nature Room, supported by the Board of Education in all new schools and encouraged in others, were included in Nature-Garden Guide: An Organ of Vitalized Nature Education for New York City Schools 5 (March 1926), n.p. 127Florence C. Fox, Cycles of Garden Life and Plant Life, Department of Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin 25 (1925). The Federation also sponsored a pamphlet by Mary K. Sherman, Natural Science and Nature Study in the School (1920–22). 128L. Lenore Conover to E. Laurence Palmer, May 22, 1927, American Nature- Study Society Papers, Cornell University Archives, Ithaca, NY. 129Lawson, ‘‘Urban-Garden Programs in the United States’’ devotes chapter seven to urban gardens in general during the depression of the 1930s. 92 History of Education Quarterly

Conclusion School gardens, home gardens, summer gardening programs, window boxes, and similar projects were intentionally designed to give students experiences with nature that were simultaneously individual and communal. These sites with active children and practical products proved to be highly visible examples of progressive education in action, coincident with other initiatives encouraged by leading educators like John Dewey. Early school gardens were intended to teach about natural phenomena, life processes, and awareness of the natural and cultivated circumstances in which plants flourished. Buttressed by the enthusiasm of local garden clubs, parents, and children who enjoyed opportunities to get out of doors and accomplish something materially rewarding, the movement garnered considerable public attention as gardens were built around country and city schools. Encouraged but sometimes constrained by local sponsors, gardens in different settings might look quite different and address very different educational intentions. Troubled boys in detention at George Junior Republic near Dryden, NY, spent many hours doing essentially farm work, while nearby pupils in Ithaca joined Anna Comstock and other teachers studying and transplanting wild flowers in their school yards. Inner-city boys in Dayton, OH farmed their own plots courtesy of the National Cash Register Company while the students at the experimental school at the University of Chicago planned more elaborate community gardens. The mobilization of gardens during World War I momentarily captivated the attention of children nationwide, but the boom was followed by a bust as the increasingly vocational programs had limited appeal to urban pupils and seemed too much like work at home to those in the country.130 The decline was gradual. There were no dramatic challenges to the idea of school gardening but the movement lost energy, as did many of the progressive initiatives in the 1920s. Nature study itself, challenged by a new movement toward systematic elementary science, moved from schools into summer camps, scouting movements, public parks, and nature preserves.131 School gardens began as expressions of progressive pedagogy at the turn of the century, buttressed by arguments and examples from Europe. They were coincident as well with contemporary concerns about nature

130Bullough, Cities and Schools in the Gilded Age, 22–23. 131Anna Botsford Comstock noted that the Cornell education program was going in this direction in ‘‘American Nature-Study Society.’’ Science 57 (February 1923): 184. For a description of such efforts see Arthur Newton Pack, The Nature Almanac: A Handbook of Nature Education (Washington: American Nature Society, 1927). The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920 93 and about connecting children to nature in ways taught them about cycles of life and provided moral uplift. Community and national organizations modified elements of nature study as they heightened the rhetoric, and established a national profile for school gardens intent on producing a better crop of girls and boys. Inevitably, the garden movement could not fulfill all the expectations, and sponsorship faltered in the postwar years, nonetheless leaving a modest legacy of bean sprouts and window boxes in classrooms. Outdoor nature studies would increasingly rely on a growing number of suburban nature centers and public parks. Before those resources were fully developed as educational tools, however, and at a time when the United States stood poised between rural and urban social identity and faced the challenges of a diminishing wilderness and potential extermination of species, school gardens provided a critical site for educators to experiment with children and with nature in an effort to improve both.