Category — History

Women Planting Pea Stakes, 1891

Camille Pissarro

Excerpt from Biography.com

Born July 10, 1830 in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. Camille Pissarro was sent to Paris to study as a boy, where he earned acclaim for his budding talent as an artist. He was obligated to return to St. Thomas in 1847 to help his father run his general store, but by 1855, he had convinced his parents to allow him to pursue his dream of becoming a painter.

Camille Pissarro returned to Paris, where the landscapes of Camille Corot and other members of the Barbizon group made a huge impression on him at the World’s Fair. The concept of working directly from nature appealed to the young artist, and he gravitated toward landscape painting. Over the next 10 years, he studied at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Suisse, where classes were free.

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Farming Heritage Project -‘Digging our Roots

Wellington-clad visitors to Heeley City Farm this weekend (Sunday 21 February 2010) can muck-in to help with the final stages of a long-running archaeology project in partnership with the University of Sheffield.

University of Sheffield´s Media Centre
19 February 2010

The Iron Age Roundhouse activity day will take place from 11am to 4pm and people will be encouraged to roll-up their sleeves and use a mixture of clay and straw to help finish the walls of the farm´s constructed Iron Age Roundhouse – a very early form of housing in Britain.

The reconstruction of the Iron Age Roundhouse forms part of a partnership with the University of Sheffield´s Department of Archaeology and the University´s Archaeology Society. Academics and students have offered advice throughout the project and will be on hand to give assistance, information and work on the Roundhouse.

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From Toons At War.
1940’s image.

Disney licensee W.L. Stensgaard produced a Victory Garden sign that featured Donald Duck chasing pests from his garden. The sign was available in two sizes and was sold in five and dimes, hardware and grocery stores.

One version of the sign featured the illustration printed on a masonite board attached to a 24-inch long stake. This sign was produced in six oil colors and had a wholesale price of $10.80 per dozen. The suggested retail was $1.69 each.

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Victory Garden – 1942

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The Rockland County Patriotic Society on their way to charge a ten-acre plot and convert it into a vegetable garden. They believe the spade is as valuable as the rifle.

How the stay-at-homes can provide the sinews of war for America and our European Allies

Popular Science Magazine 1917

America turns to the soil in earnest. Even women are responding to the call for active service. Mrs. Ruth Litt, the wealthy suffragist, has turned over her 135-acre farm for cultivation, the work to be done entirely by women.

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28 Minutes of classic radio humour by two of the greats.

Listen here:

Gracie: You were right George, we’ll just a have a sweet little Victory Garden.

George: Good. We’ll plant some asparagus.

Gracie: And we’ll plant some beets on top of it.

George: On top of it?

Gracie: Ah huh. So when the asparagus start to come up, they’ll tickle the beets on the bottom and they’ll come up sooner.

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Although there is no story to accompany this graphic in the 1941 edition of the comic, it is a wonderful promotional image, which would have reached millions of kids during the war. Superb!

Your car – like your Victory Garden – is a national asset these days. So care for it wisely! Spare it excessive wear with stem-to-stern Marfak chassis lubrication.

Larger image here.

WWI Home Garden Seed Advertising by Haskell Coffin 1919

Haskell Coffin (1878 – 1941) A versatile illustrator, gracing covers for several magazines, Redbook and The American being two long-term stints. Becoming famous as a portrayer of American beauty, the Coffin girl could be found on note cards, sheet music, calendars, decorative boxes, fashion catalogs. His “Joan of Arc Saved France” WWI poster is well known.

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by Elaine F. Weiss
Potomac Books Inc. 352 pages
December 31, 2008

“From 1917 to 1920 the Woman’s Land Army brought thousands of city workers, society women, artists, business professionals, and college students into rural America to take over the farm work after men were called to wartime service. These women wore military-style uniforms, lived in communal camps, and did what was considered “men’s work”– plowing fields, driving tractors, planting, harvesting, and hauling lumber. The Land Army insisted its “farmerettes” be paid wages equal to male farm laborers and protected by an eight-hour workday. These farmerettes were shocking at first and encountered skeptical farmers’ scorn, but as they proved themselves willing and capable, farmers began to rely upon the women workers and became their loudest champions.”

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Pupils of Mrs. Belmont’s Farm for Girls. Larger image here.

New York Times
March 5, 1911

Down at Mrs. Belmont’s place on Long Island there are 200 acres adjoining her house which she wants in time to turn over entirely to women farmers. Gardening, the care of lawns, raising vegetables, growing fruits, every side of work about a “big place” will be taught. And in a year or two the women will go out qualified to earn a good living, and, with thrift, to become owners of their own farms.

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National Emergency War Garden Commission. Sow The Seeds of Victory Posters in cigar store window. Circa 1914-1919.

Teaching With Documents: Sow the Seeds of Victory!
Posters from the Food Administration During World War I

Excerpt from the National Archives

“To achieve the results, the Food Administration combined an emphasis on patriotism with the lure of advertising created by its own Advertising Section. This section produced a wealth of posters for both outdoor and indoor display. One proclaimed: “Food is Ammunition-Don’t waste it.” Another featured a woman clothed in stars and stripes reaching out to embrace the message: “Be Patriotic sign your country’s pledge to save the food.” A third combined patriotism with a modern healthy diet message. At the top, the poster encouraged readers to: “Eat more corn, oats and rye products-fish and poultry-fruits, vegetables and potatoes, baked, boiled and broiled foods.”

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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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Detroit Mayor Hazen S. Pingree

From Reform in Detroit – Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics
By Melvin G. Holli
1969

Excerpt Page 70:

During the second summer of the depression (1894) Pingree launched his “potato patch plan,” which, as a work relief measure, has been described as one of the original contributions of the nineties. The Mayor’s scheme envisioned the cultivation of vacant lots by the city’s unfortunate, who were, in many cases, but a few years removed from a peasant agricultural economy of Europe. Since Detroit’s poor commission was near insolvency and the city treasury almost empty, Pingree called upon the churches to contribute funds for the purchase of ploes, implements, and seed. “the Mayor proposes to find out if those elegant churches are only for show or for doing some real good,” a Pingree aide told a reporter.

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“Sow and Grow” poster, Cleveland Public Schools Horticulture program.

Feeding Cleveland: Urban Agriculture

Cleveland State University Libraries presents The Cleveland Memory Project

A recurring theme in 20th century Cleveland that continues to the present day is that during difficult economic periods communities of people have come together to  raise food crops on city land. The working men’s farms during the Great Depression, the victory gardens during World War II, community gardens established during the years of urban renewal, and the present day market gardeners of the local food movement, all provide examples of revivals of urban agriculture as a response to economic difficulties. 

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Soldiers of the Soil: A Historical Review of the United States School Garden Army

By Rose Hayden-Smith
4-H Youth Development and Master Gardener Advisor,
UCCE-Ventura County
WINTER 2006, 20 pages

“Every boy and every girl should be a producer. Production is the first principle in education. The growing of plants and animals should therefore become an integral part of the school program. Such is the aim of the U.S. School Garden Army.”

With these words, the federal Bureau of Education (BOE) launched the United States School Garden Army (USSGA) during World War I. The USSGA represented an unprecedented governmental effort to make agricultural education a formal part of the public school curriculum throughout the United States.

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The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, 1954

“For fourteen successive years the gardens at Bilignin were my joy, working in them during the summers and planning and dreaming of them during the winters. The summers frequently commenced early in April with the planting, and ended late in October with the last gathering of the winter vegetables.
Bilignin surrounded by mountains and not far from the French Alps —”

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10 minutes from the Introduction to Victorian Kitchen Garden.

The Victorian Kitchen Garden

The Victorian Kitchen Garden was a 13-part television series produced in 1987 for BBC Two (Must see. Mike). It recreated a kitchen garden of the Victorian era at Chilton Foliat in Wiltshire. The presenter was the horticultural lecturer, Peter Thoday, the master gardener was Harry Dodson.

Harry James Dodson (1919 – 2005) was an English gardener who became a celebrity as a result of the BBC television documentary series, which featured his professional expertise and his reminiscences.

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Larger image here.

A Flemish Kitchen Garden: La Coupeuse de Choux

By Henri De Braekeleer (1840-88)
ca. 1864 (painted)
oil on canvas
Place of origin:
Antwerp (possibly, painted)

The Antwerp artist Henri de Braekeleer belonged to a family of painters. Influenced by 17th-century Dutch genre paintings, he specialised in humble scenes of everyday life, as in this example, in which a woman in peasant dress bends over to cut a cabbage. These were popular in a period of increasing industrialisation.

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