Linking the 1931 Thrift Gardens with the 1894 Potato Patch Plan through Mrs. Hazel Pingree Depew, the former Mayor’s daughter

Mayor Frank Murphy – the Detroit Years
By Sidney Fine
1984 Vol 3

Excerpt:

The outstanding popular success of the Mayor’s Unemployment Committee (MUC) and, in the opinion of the mayor, “perhaps” its “most important undertaking,” was the Detroit thrift-garden program. The suggestion that the MUC undertake this activity came from Murphy himself, who had been reading George Catlin’s The Story of Detroit and had been impressed with the account of Hazen Pingree’s famous “potato patch plan” and the manner in which a substantial number of welfare families in Detroit during the depression years 1894-1896 had grown a portion of their food on vacant lots donated to the city for that purpose. The MUC decided in March, 1931, to undertake a similar program of “vacant lot gardening.”

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Poster showing a cartoon from the Chicago Evening Post of a farmer waving a banner “War Gardens” as his cannon made from a bushel basket fires produce and a German figure sky high.

Chicago: R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., 1918

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Photo by Chris Steele-Perkins, 1999

Photo by Bruno Barbey, 1995