The 21st Century Matriarch

Liberty Hyde Bailey edited the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture from 1916-1919; the six volumes are available from Internet Archive. According to Wikipedia, he had retired from his career at Cornell (1988-1913) to become a private scholar. These volumes must have been one of his post-retirement projects. His daughter, Ethel Zoe Bailey, had graduated from Smith College in 1911 and evidently worked alongside her father on these volumes. His most significant and lasting contributions were in the botanical study of cultivated plants.

I enjoyed the illustrations of familiar plants that were being grown in the early 1900s. Most of the illustrations are black and white photographs but I chose sample images from the few that were in color. The produce aisles of our grocery stores have a more limited selection!

The first decades of the 1900s were when a lot of Colleges of Agriculture were formed. Bailey formed Cornell’s College of Agriculture and secured public funding in 1904. Agriculture was rebuilding for the future – trying to get more production of fertile lands farmed, in many cases, by immigrants that had arrived in the prior 50 years. One side of my family tree arrived from Europe in the 1890s. They wouldn’t have seen these books, but they were assisted by the agricultural extension services, the 4-H movement, parcel post, and rural electrification that Bailey helped initiate.

Hildegarde Hawthorne was the granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne and a writer as well. I found 6 of her books on Internet Archive from the early 1900s – easy to browse. She lived until 1952 and continued writing so there are probably others that will become available as their copyright expires. The last one is probably my favorite.

Girls in Bookland

Old Seaport Towns of New England with illustrations by John Albert Seaford

Rambles in old college towns with illustrations by John Albert Seaford. The second picture below is the library tower at Cornell; it’s surrounded by more buildings now…I remember it from my daughter’s undergraduate days.