Victory Garden Day, April 1st, 1918

Photo: Boy Scouts at attention — staircase, rotunda, City Hall. (Victory Garden day, April 1st, 1918.) The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley.
See larger image here.

Although we associate victory gardens with World War II, Laura Lawson says the term was actually coined near the end of World War I, replacing the more commonly used “war garden.” This, after all, was the conflict in which sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage.”

Lawson’s book describes the festivities on April 1, 1918, designated by the mayor as War Garden Day in San Francisco. The Chronicle editorialized that “the first food gun of the nation” had been fired.

Soldiers, sailors and Marines marched up Market Street to the Civic Center, accompanied by floats displaying the products of backyard vegetable gardens. Twenty young women performed a “dance of war gardens and victory” in front of City Hall.

War Garden Day was only a small part of a huge national effort. In 1917 and 1918, more than 5 million gardens were planted, producing $875 million worth of food. Everyone from socialites (a Long Island woman dug up her polo field to plant potatoes) to schoolchildren got involved. The federal Bureau of Education launched the U.S. School Garden Army with War Department funding. Participating students, called “soldiers of the soil,” were awarded medals for working on school and home plots.

Above an excerpt from ‘Remembering the victory garden’
By Ron Sullivan, Joe Eaton
San Francisco Chronicle July 23, 2008
See complete article here.

See: City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America
by Laura J. Lawson
(Paperback) 2005