The admissions files / School farms, 1902–1913
The carrots would like to see your pass
In New York’s school gardens, a child could have a little farm. First, keep hold of the tag.
New York City once ran school farms: vegetable gardens inside its parks, with a gate and individual plots. The Parks Department’s 1913 report lists the rules for plot owners, and one is a model of brevity: “If you lose your tag, you lose your plot.” No second tag was given. No one was admitted without one. The report states this with the calm of an adult who has never spent twenty minutes hunting for a child’s other mitten. The carrots, whatever their feelings, could not vouch for you.
The farms were Fannie Griscom Parsons’s project, and in 1902 she started one on Manhattan’s west side. She gave it the bones of a small city: four “boroughs,” a main path called Broadway, and a government the children elected. A city inside a city, then, with considerably more radishes per constituent. Broadway, in this one, probably ran past somebody’s onions.
Her son Henry wrote a gardening manual in 1910, and it describes what each child was handed at enrollment: a tag with name and address on one side, garden and plot number on the other, hung from “a strong string” about the neck. Mitten clips have their devotees, but a string round the neck changes the question from “where did you put it?” to “where is your neck?”, which most days has a ready answer.
For the planting lesson, the manual directs an instructor to lead about twenty-five children into the garden, warning them to watch quietly. Any adult assistants, the manual adds, “must be specially warned” to keep silence and strict attention. The children came to learn gardening; the grown-ups, apparently, to learn the harder skill.
Any parent who has stood at the back of a classroom on an open morning knows the posture: hands clasped, mouth shut, face doing all the talking, and a private dread of being the one whose phone goes off.