Aiken, D. Wyatt (17 March 1828–06 April 1887), agricultural editor and congressman, was born David Wyatt Aiken in Winnsboro, South Carolina, the son of David Aiken, a merchant and planter, and Nancy Kerr. Descended from an Irish family that had prospered in the United States, Aiken received an excellent education at Mount Zion Institute in his hometown and, as was common for the sons of planters, attended South Carolina College. He graduated in 1849 and taught mathematics for two years at Mount Zion. After traveling to Europe in 1851, he returned home to marry Mattie Gaillard in 1852. Before her death in 1855, they had two children. Aiken married Virginia Carolina Smith in 1857; they had eleven children. The following year he purchased a plantation from the estate of Virginia’s father in Cokesbury, Abbeville District. As the proprietor of “Coronaca” plantation, he became involved in the agricultural reform movement and in states’ rights politics. He fervently believed that “agriculture climbs high in the scale of science: it develops thought, matures judgment, and requires for the execution, untiring energy, perseverance, and industry.” He was instrumental in the formation of the Abbeville Agricultural Society and was a member of its executive committee. In 1858 he attended the Southern Commercial Convention in Montgomery, Alabama, a meeting that quickly became a forum for disunionist politics....
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Aiken, D. Wyatt (1828-1887), agricultural editor and congressman
William L. Barney
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Bromfield, Louis (1896-1956)
Maker: Carl Van Vechten
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Bromfield, Louis (1896-1956), novelist, experimental farmer, and newspaper columnist
David D. Anderson
Bromfield, Louis (27 December 1896–18 March 1956), novelist, experimental farmer, and newspaper columnist, was born in Mansfield, Ohio, the son of Charles Bromfield, a banker and local Democratic office holder, and Annette Marie Coulter. His father was from an old New England family, and his mother was the daughter of a pioneer family of Richland County, Ohio; both ancestries would influence his later fiction. Bromfield attended Mansfield public schools, spending summers on his mother’s family’s farm. In 1914–1915 he studied agriculture at Cornell University and then briefly attended Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio. He then studied journalism at Columbia University until his enlistment in the U.S. Army Ambulance Service in June 1917. He served with Section 577, attached to the French army, from December 1917 to February 1919. He participated in seven major battles during World War I and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He was discharged in June 1919 while still in France....
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Chamberlain, William Isaac (1837-1920), agriculturalist and editor
Raymond M. Hyser
Chamberlain, William Isaac (11 February 1837–30 June 1920), agriculturalist and editor, was born in Sharon, Connecticut, the son of Jacob Chamberlain and Anna Nutting, farmers. When Chamberlain was only fifteen months old, his parents moved from Connecticut to Hudson, Ohio, where they purchased and maintained a 147-acre farm. He received an A.B. from Western Reserve College (located in Hudson) in 1859 and an A.M. from the same school two years later. For three years he taught Greek and Latin at Shaw Academy in East Cleveland, Ohio, then became a member of the Western Reserve College faculty teaching the same languages. In 1863 he became superintendent of the Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, schools, a position he held for two years, but with a decline in his health and his elderly parents needing more care Chamberlain resigned that position to teach languages at Western Reserve College and to maintain the family farm, which he had purchased in 1863. Also in 1863 he married Lucy Jones Marshall, daughter of publisher David Marshall, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They had five children....
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Cobb, Cully Alton (1884-1975), agricultural educator, editor, and publisher
Sandra S. Vance
Cobb, Cully Alton (25 February 1884–07 May 1975), agricultural educator, editor, and publisher, was born in a log cabin on the farm of his paternal grandfather near Prospect, Tennessee, the son of Napoleon Bonaparte Cobb, a farmer and rural minister, and Mary Agnes Woodward. Cobb attended public school in Giles County, Tennessee, and Decatur, Alabama. He entered Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Mississippi State University) in 1904 and graduated in 1908 with a bachelor of science degree in agriculture. From 1908 to 1910 he served as principal of Chickasaw County Agricultural High School at Buena Vista, Mississippi. The first of fifty such institutions established in the state between 1908 and 1920, the school afforded rural youths a college-preparatory education as well as practical training in farming. In 1910 he married Ora May “Byrdie” Ball, with whom he had two children....
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Colman, Norman Jay (1827-1911), agricultural journalist and first secretary of agriculture
Bruce E. Seely
Colman, Norman Jay (16 May 1827–03 November 1911), agricultural journalist and first secretary of agriculture, was born near Richfield Springs, New York, the son of Hamilton Colman and Nancy Sprague, farmers. He attended local academies and soon was teaching school himself. In 1847 Colman left home for Kentucky, where plans to open a school in Owensboro were ended by an illness. He recovered and directed a public school in Brandenburg before enrolling at the University of Louisville Law School, earning a degree in 1849. He opened a successful law office in New Albany, Indiana, married Clara Porter in 1851, and in 1852 was elected district attorney. A year later they moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and purchased a farm, although Colman continued to practice law and was elected an alderman within two years. The couple had two children before Clara Colman died in 1863....
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Dymond, John (1836-1922), planter, publisher, and politician
Edward L. Lach, Jr.
Dymond, John (03 May 1836–05 March 1922), planter, publisher, and politician, was born in Canada (exact location unrecorded), the son of Richard Dymond, a Methodist minister, and Anne Hawkens. During his early childhood Dymond’s family moved to Zanesville, Ohio, where he was educated in the local public schools and the Zanesville Academy before entering Bartlett’s College, a business school in Cincinnati. Following his graduation from Bartlett’s in 1857 he took a job as a clerk with his father, who had by that time established himself in the mercantile trade. He then toyed with the cotton manufacturing business in partnership with Homer White (trading under the name White & Dymond) before moving to New York City, where, on the eve of the Civil War, he took a job as a traveling salesman with a firm whose name has not survived. He returned to Zanesville on 3 June 1862 to marry Nancy Elizabeth Cassidy; they had six children....
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Gresham, Newt (1858-1906), labor organizer and editor
Carol A. Lockwood
Gresham, Newt (20 February 1858–10 April 1906), labor organizer and editor, was born Isaac Newton Gresham in Lauderdale County, near Florence, Alabama, the son of Henry Gresham and Marcipia Narcissa Wilcoxon, tenant farmers. The family moved to Kaufman County, Texas, in 1859 (though some sources claim they moved after the Civil War). After his parents’ deaths in 1868, Gresham lived with his older brother Ben....
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Heard, Dwight Bancroft (1869-1929), investment banker, farmer, and publisher
Elizabeth Zoe Vicary
Heard, Dwight Bancroft (01 May 1869–14 March 1929), investment banker, farmer, and publisher, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Leander Bradford Heard, a wholesale grocer, and Lucy Bancroft. His father died in 1882. After Heard finished high school in Brookline, Massachusetts, his mother moved the family to Chicago, where Heard began work at the hardware sellers Hibbard, Spencer & Bartlett. The wife of the firm’s president, Adolphus Bartlett, was a distant relative of Heard, who quickly became Bartlett’s protégé. Heard was the company’s specialist in credit sales in Wisconsin and much of the Midwest. In 1893 he married Maie Pitkin Bartlett, Adolphus Bartlett’s daughter; they had one child....
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London, Jack (1876-1916), writer, war correspondent, and agronomist
Earle Labor
London, Jack (12 January 1876–22 November 1916), writer, war correspondent, and agronomist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Flora Wellman and, allegedly, William Henry Chaney, a reformer and professor of astrology. Chaney separated from his common-law wife when he learned of her pregnancy, angrily denying his paternity and later insisting (in two 1897 letters written in response to London’s inquiries) that he had been impotent at the time of the child’s conception. Wellman nevertheless named her son “John Griffith Chaney” on his birth certificate....
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London, Jack (1876-1916)
Maker: Arnold Genthe
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Mapes, James Jay (1806-1866), chemist and writer
Mark R. Finlay
Mapes, James Jay (29 May 1806–10 January 1866), chemist and writer, was born in Maspeth, New York, the son of Jonas Mapes, a merchant and importer, and Elizabeth Tylee. While at a boarding school on Long Island, Mapes lived for a time with the English reformer William Cobbett. As a scientist, however, he was largely self-taught....
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Mapes, James Jay (1806-1866)
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Polk, Leonidas LaFayette (24 April 1837–11 June 1892), farm editor and national president of the Farmers' Alliance
Robert McMath
Polk, Leonidas LaFayette (24 April 1837–11 June 1892), farm editor and national president of the Farmers' Alliance, farm editor and national president of the Farmers’ Alliance, was born in Anson County, North Carolina, the son of Andrew Polk and Serena Autry, farmers. Although he would become a leader of the nation’s poor and militant farmers, Polk grew up in relatively affluent surroundings. His father’s ownership of 1,800 acres and thirty-two slaves placed him in the lower ranks of the planter class....
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Robinson, Solon (1803-1880), author, agricultural journalist, and Indiana pioneer
Donald B. Marti
Robinson, Solon (21 October 1803–03 November 1880), author, agricultural journalist, and Indiana pioneer, was born in Tolland, Connecticut, the son of Jacob Robinson, a farmer and cooper, and Salinda Ladd. His father died when Solon Robinson was about six, and then his mother married James Robinson, one of her deceased husband’s cousins. After his mother died and her second husband refused further responsibility for his stepchildren, Solon Robinson was in the care of William Bottom. He worked on his guardian’s farm, got a little education in a country school near Lisbon, Connecticut, and briefly worked as a carpenter’s apprentice, which was harder labor than his health could stand. In 1818, for unknown reasons, Solon successfully petitioned that Vine Robinson, an uncle in Brooklyn, Connecticut, be his guardian. Solon’s later devotion to temperance may have been learned from his uncle, but little more is known about the next few years of his life....
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Rodale, J. I. (1898-1971), health food publisher
Carlton Jackson
Rodale, J. I. (16 August 1898–07 June 1971), health food publisher, was born Jerome Irving Cohen in New York City, the son of Michael Cohen, a capmaker and grocer, and Bertha Rouda. Both parents were Polish immigrants. Rodale studied at New York and Columbia Universities but did not earn any degrees. At age twenty he became an auditor for the Internal Revenue Service, and at twenty-one he moved to Pittsburgh, where he worked in a private accounting firm for three years. He wanted, however, for some vague reason that he never explained, to be a farmer and publisher. In 1920 he traveled to Kentucky on business and became enchanted with the Bluegrass State. “Being among farmers and in farm country I was more and more imbued with the ambition of some day having my own farm and riding to town with my children on a buck-board drawn by two trusty horses.”...
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Rogers, Will (04 November 1879–15 August 1935), entertainer and social commentator
Peter C. Rollins
Rogers, Will (04 November 1879–15 August 1935), entertainer and social commentator, was born William Penn Adair Rogers near Oologah, Oklahoma, in what was then the Cooweescoowee District of Indian Territory, the son of Clement Vann Rogers and Mary America Schrimsher, Cherokee ranchers. Rogers County, which contains both Oologah, site of the historic Rogers home, and Claremore, site of the Will Rogers Memorial and Museum, is named after the prominent father, not the prominent son. “Uncle Clem” was a major player in Oklahoma politics before and after statehood (1907), serving as a judge, as a member of the Dawes Commission (to distribute Indian lands prior to statehood), and as the first local banker. Will’s loving wife, the former Betty Blake, whom he married in 1908, later remembered that “Will had everything he wanted. He had spending money and the best string of cow ponies in the country. No boy in Indian Territory had more than Uncle Clem’s boy.” (Yet being “Uncle Clem’s boy” could have its downside, too.)...
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Rogers, Will (04 November 1879–15 August 1935)
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Stockbridge, Horace Edward (1857-1930), agricultural chemist and editor
Mark R. Finlay
Stockbridge, Horace Edward (19 May 1857–30 October 1930), agricultural chemist and editor, was born in Hadley, Massachusetts, the son of Levi Stockbridge and Joanna Smith. He grew up on the college farm of the Massachusetts Agricultural College (now part of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst), where his father was president and a prominent leader in American agricultural education. In 1878 Horace earned a B.S. degree from Massachusetts Agricultural College in a joint program with Boston University. In 1882 he traveled to Göttingen, Germany, where he earned his Ph.D. in agricultural chemistry under Wilhelm Henneberg in 1884. Upon his return to the United States, Stockbridge was married in 1885 to Arabella “Belle” Lamar, member of a prominent political family from Sumter County, Georgia. The couple eventually had eight children, only four of whom survived to adulthood....
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Vick, James (1818-1882), publisher of horticultural journals and mail-order seed merchant
Donald B. Marti
Vick, James (23 November 1818–16 May 1882), publisher of horticultural journals and mail-order seed merchant, was born in Chichester, England, the son of James Vick and Elizabeth Prime. His father, whose principal occupation is unknown, is reported to have been an enthusiastic amateur gardener; Vick’s English boyhood is otherwise obscure. He moved to New York City with his parents in 1833, learned the printing trade, and worked on publications including the ...
