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Agricultural Education in Nineteenth-Century Ontario: An Idea in Search of an Institution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

D. A. Lawr
D. A. Lawr*
Affiliation:
History of Education Department, Althouse College, the University of Western Ontario
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Extract

In 1870 John Carling, Ontario's Commissioner of Public Works and Agriculture, repeated one of the most persistent ideas of the nineteenth century: what this country needed, he said, was some kind of agricultural education in “the science of farming.”

Type
Science, Professionalism, and the Higher Learning
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 3: Education and Social Change in English-Speaking Canada. , Fall 1972 , pp. 334 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. Commissioner of Agriculture and Arts, Report, 1870, p. xi [hereafter cited as Agriculture and Arts].Google Scholar

2. Rev. [Hartley, E., Dewart, Toronto, “Characteristics and Tendencies of the Time,” Ontario Teachers’ Association, Minutes, 1871, p. 31.Google Scholar

3. Morgan, Henry J., ed., The Dominion Annual Register and Review 1886 (Montreal, 1887), pp. 231–34.Google Scholar

4. British American Cultivator (Toronto), June 1845, p. 176.Google Scholar

5. Agriculture and Arts, 1868, p. 8.Google Scholar

6. President James Mills, Ontario Agricultural College and Experimental Farm, Report, 1885, p. 3 [hereafter cited as OAC Report].Google Scholar

7. Bryant, John, publ., “Agricultural Education,” Ontario Teachers’ Association, Minutes, 1890, p. 25.Google Scholar

8. Charles True, Alfred, A History of Agricultural Education in the United States, USDA Publication no. 36 (Washington, D.C., 1929), p. 12.Google Scholar

9. Hodgins, John G., Documentary History of Education in Upper Canada 5 (Toronto, 1912): 187, 190 [hereafter cited as DHE]; ibid., 6:63.Google Scholar

10. Expressions of these three principles can be found in the various Petitions printed in DHE, and in an excellent editorial review in the St. Catharines Journal, May 15, 1845.Google Scholar

11. Quoted in Burwash, N., “Origins and Development of the University of Toronto,“ in The University of Toronto and its Colleges, 1827–1906, ed. Hutton, Maurice, (Toronto, 1906), p. 30.Google Scholar

12. DHE, 5:145.Google Scholar

13. Journal and Transactions of the Board of Agriculture of Upper Canada, 1856, 1:246.Google Scholar

14. DHE, 12:275.Google Scholar

15. Journal of Education (Toronto), June 1857, pp. 87–88.Google Scholar

16. DHE, 17:67.Google Scholar

17. Journal of Education, February 1966, p. 22.Google Scholar

18. Agriculture and Arts, 1868, p. 4.Google Scholar

19. Ellis, W. H., “Faculty of Applied Science,“ in University of Toronto, Hutton, ed., pp. 180–3.Google Scholar

20. Ontario, , Sessional Papers, 1873 no. 32, p. 2.Google Scholar

21. Akenson, Donald H., The Irish Education Experiment (London, 1970), p. 149.Google Scholar

22. Russell, Sir John, “Rothhamsted Experimental Station,“ Encyclopaedia Britannica (1959), 19:571–2.Google Scholar

23. Ontario, , Sessional Papers, 1873 no. 32, p. 16.Google Scholar

24. Ibid., 1871–1872, no. 5, p. 19.Google Scholar

25. Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Journals, 1873, pp. 220–1.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., p. 224. An eye-witness account of the opposition to the Guelph site is presented in Clarke, Charles, Sixty Years in Upper Canada (Toronto, 1908), pp. 194–96; see also Jones, R. L., A History of Agriculture in Ontario 1613–1880 (Toronto, 1946), p. 335.Google Scholar

27. Ontario, , Sessional Papers, 1871–1872, no. 55, pp. 14–15.Google Scholar

28. Journal of Education, December 1873, p. 181.Google Scholar

29. Ontario, , Sessional Papers, 1871–1872, no. 55, p. 18.Google Scholar

30. Ibid., p. 15.Google Scholar

31. Ibid., p. 13.Google Scholar

32. Ontario School of Agriculture and Experimental Farm, Report, 1877, pp. 32–39.Google Scholar

33. Journal of Education, May 1874, p. 74.Google Scholar

34. Agriculture and Arts, 1874, pp. xi–xii; 1875, p. xiii.Google Scholar

35. Farmers’ Advocate (London, Ont.), March 1882, p. 83.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., February 17, 1910, p. 263.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., February 1877, p. 29.Google Scholar

38. Most of the nonresidents were from England. For an account of one such student, see Benson, Lillian Rea, “An OAC Student in the 1880s,“ Ontario History, 42, no. 2 (April 1950): 67–80.Google Scholar

39. DHE, 15:188.Google Scholar

40. Farmers’ Advocate, May 1879, p. 98.Google Scholar

41. Ibid., June 1887, p. 162; February 1886, p. 39.Google Scholar

42. Middleton, J. E. and Landon, Fred, The Province of Ontario, A History 1 (Toronto, 1927): 474; Canada, Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Agricultural Industry, Report, 1884, p. 174.Google Scholar

43. Canada, Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labor in Canada, Report, vol. 2, “Evidence—Ontario” (Ottawa, 1889), pp. 446–48.Google Scholar

44. “Letter to the Editor,” Farmers’ Advocate, March 1882, p. 83.Google Scholar

45. Patterson, T. F. in Ontario, Farmers’ Institutes, Report, 1895, p. 43.Google Scholar

46. There are many references in support of this assessment. One of the most forceful is a letter in the Farmers’ Advocate, September 26, 1912, pp. 1678–79. The same preference was common among American farmers. See, for example, the Proceedings of the 18th Session of the National Grange of the Patrons of Industry, 1884, p. 82.Google Scholar

47. There is a brief account of the development of agricultural science in Mason, Stephen F., A History of the Sciences (New York, 1962), pp. 517–20; see also, McLarty, Duncan, “A Century of Development of Agricultural Science in Western Ontario,” Western Ontario Historical Notes 5, no. 2 (June 1947): 49; Kaye Lamb, W. and Cameron, Thomas W. M., “Biologists and Biological Research Since 1864,” in Pioneers of Canadian Science, ed. Stanley, G. F. G., (Toronto, 1966), pp. 36–43.Google Scholar

48. Glen, Robert, “Entomology,“ Encyclopedia Canadiana 4 (1970): 19–20.Google Scholar

49. Canada, Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Agricultural Industry, Report, 1884, p. 152.Google Scholar

50. Agriculture and Arts, 1875, p. 263.Google Scholar

51. Thomas, J., New York State Agricultural Society, in British American Cultivator, February 1847, pp. 51–58. Indeed, until the end of the century, some progressive innovations were introduced to Ontario farms in spite of the agricultural scientists. One example was the practice of dehorning cattle. A full account is given in Canada, Sessional Papers, 1893, no. 2.Google Scholar

52. See Kelly, Kenneth, “The Transfer of British Ideas on Improved Farming to Ontario During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,“ Ontario History, 43, no. 2 (June 1971): 103–11.Google Scholar

53. “President's Address,” in Agriculture and Arts, 1878, p. 195; Benson, “OAC Student,” p. 71.Google Scholar

54. For the changes in Ontario farming in this period see “The Development of the Agricultural Industry, 1870–1910,” in Lawr, Douglas A., “The Development of Agricultural Education in Ontario, 1870–1910“ (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1972), pp. 1–29.Google Scholar

55. An interesting development in view of the founders’ antipathy toward University association.Google Scholar

56. OAC Report, 1901, p. 220.Google Scholar

57. Ibid., 1902, p. xiii; 1903, p. xvi.Google Scholar

58. Ontario, Superintendent of Farmers’ Institutes, Report, 1902–1903, p. 5.Google Scholar

59. OAC Report, 1903, p. ix.Google Scholar

60. Taton, René, ed., Science in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1961), p. 407.Google Scholar

61. OAC Report, 1909, pp. 24–36, 85–86.Google Scholar

62. Ontario Experimental Union, Report, 1889, p. 5.Google Scholar

63. Farmers’ Advocate, July 24, 1913, p. 1294.Google Scholar

64. OAC Report, 1909, pp. 97–98.Google Scholar

65. Farmers’ Advocate, March 29, 1906, pp. 494–95.Google Scholar

66. James, C. C., “History of Farming in Canada,“ in Canada and its Provinces, ed. Shortt, Adam and Doughty, Arthur G., 18 no. 2 (Toronto, 1914):582.Google Scholar

67. Ontario Department of Agriculture, Report of the Oxford County Agricultural Representative, 1913, p. 10 (typescript in ODA Office, Woodstock).Google Scholar

68. Canada, Department of Agriculture, Canada Agriculture, The First Hundred Years (Ottawa, 1967), p. 5.Google Scholar

69. Ruddick, J. A., An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Dairying Industry in Canada, Department of Agriculture Bulletin no. 28 (Ottawa, 1911), p. 56.Google Scholar

70. Farmers’ Advocate, June 15, 1905, p. 882; ibid., February 27 1908, p. 357.Google Scholar