100 years ago in The Record
Friday, May 11, 1917
“True to their promise, and fulfilling the confidence placed in them, fifty or sixty boys of the High and Central schools entered vigorously into their part of the local greater food production campaign,” The Record reports. With the U.S. at war with Germany, cities across the country are turning open lots into gardens or small farms to meet an expected jump in demand for food. Many also look to the food production effort to reduces prices that have been inflated by shortages in recent years. The students report to a five- acre plot on the city waterworks property at 1 p.m. on a windy, overcast afternoon to plant potatoes. “The fresh, well-dragged earth was neatly marked out in rows, and there the boys, in groups of threes and fours, followed, dropping the seed at equal spaces,” our reporter writes. “They worked with a spirit of contest in seeing who would get to the end first, but care and exactness were not forgotten, and no farmer could have done better. While some dropped, others were busy hastening to and from the supply wagon carrying the seed so that no time was lost by the droppers in going after their own seed. It was a wellorganized bit of effort, and the program went like clockwork.” A flag-raising ceremony follows the planting. Assembly- man John Shannon tells the students that “they were doing in this way their bit for God and country….they in their present youth need have no reason to feel inability to serve in this time of need. For they have served and served well. They were patriots.”
After the flag-raising, the students hold a cookout in a ravine conveniently sheltered from the wind, cutting down dead trees for firewood. “The blaze was a crackling, vigorous one when rolls and frankfurters arrived in neatly covered baskets. A yell went up at their appearance.
“Blistered, sizzling and oozing grease, the ‘dogs’ then found berth between the halves of rolls – for a moment. A dozen sticks were over the blaze all the time. As everyone got their sandwich and disposed of it, got another and disposed of that, and still another, Silver Falls, a hundred feet away, and given greater life by recent rains, rumbled merrily and prettily down their course.”
Private property owners are also setting land aside for food cultivation. The Earl & Wilson company has opened eight acres on Brunswick Road for planting, just a three-minute walk from their Congress Street facility. More than 200 employees have volunteered to work individual 20’ x 60’ plots so far for the cooperative E.&W. Garden Association.