100 years ago in the Saratogian
Saturday, July 13, 1918. “It was unfortunate that the weather Saturday was so threatening,” The Saratogian reports, “It wouldn’t have been a bad thing at all for a lot of Saratogians to have gone out to the north farm and seen the inspiring spectacle of the flag dedication.”
The flag raising takes place at the Yaddo colony, where Katrina Trask has opened land to youth farmers for the U.S. war effort for the second consecutive year.
“Double the number of small farms over 1917 are being cultivated this year,” a reporter writes, “The young gardeners have met with all sorts of handicaps from the weather man. It has been too cold for corn and Friday … just after they had hoed out the last weed and had got their young tomato plants and small beans and youthful onions all slicked up for exhibition Saturday, along came a cloudburst, and in half an hour the gardens were six inches under water.”
“Sixty or more” young people, mostly girls between the ages of ten and fourteen, tend crops on the Yaddo farm. They’re supervised by Mr. and Mrs. John H. Irons.
“This year we came perilously near to want in our own country,” Irons says today, “but in those countries across the sea the men and women, boys and girls, are starving. So the president has asked each one of you to do his part, whether small or great.
“I want to emphasize to you that every pound of food you raise on this ground you have taken as the gift of the Lady of Yaddo means that another pound may be released to be sent across the sea.”
The “Lady,” while still an active author, is largely a shut-in. As is her custom, Trask sends a message to be read at the ceremony rather than appear herself.
“I think one of the things that will blossom from these sad years of necessity will be a greater appreciation of the value of working in the ground, of cultivating the soil, and of taking part in agriculture,” Trask writes.
“After the baptism of blood, which the War has given — when our nearest and dearest have laid down their lives — thinking men and women, earnest boys and girls, will feel that life is too sacred and too serious to waste in idle dissipation or in thoughtless frivolity. Work will have a new value, a new dignity, especially the work of making things grow.”
Accepting the flag on behalf of the girl farmers, Adelaide Wallace promises that “Not by words alone but by service we will prove our appreciation of this gift.”
— Kevin Gilbert