...Several hundred people were standing in the station yard on the bank of Pipe Creek when the train pulled into town and stopped on the siding.The P.A. System was set up. The county agent introduced the visiting experts who each gave a short talk. The agronomist talked about the latest wheat varieties - Kanred, Blackhull, and Tenmarq - which are the grandparents of our current varieties. The soil scientist talked about the advantages of early plowing and whether shallow or deep plowing gave the best yields. This was before herbicides or commercial fertilizers were used in this area. The entomologist talked about avoiding Hessian fly by planting the fly free date and looked ahead to developing new varieties in a few years, which would be able to resist this damaging pest.
Then the doors to the coaches were opened and the people filed through looking at the exhibits that had been set up. This was an example of using showmanship and modern technology - the train - to bring education to the people.(1)
Shortly after the turn of this century, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company began preaching the gospel of better farming to farmers along its route. The preachers of this ministry were agricultural experts from the state agricultural colleges; their pulpits were aboard special agricultural demonstration trains showcasing state-of-the-art livestock exhibits - testimony to the message of diversified farming. The spoken word was enhanced by the written word, a special bible called the Earth, an agricultural newspaper put out by the Santa Fe. J. Frank Jarrell was the editor.
Records of the first known trains of this kind in Kansas are to be found at Kansas State University, and date back to 1905. These records show that "Farmers Institute" trains, as they were called by the agricultural college, were run in cooperation with several railroads, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe among them. They were more simply organized than the trains run after World War I by the Santa Fe, which this paper focuses on, but they contained the same elements: a Grand Island train in 1905 made a four-day tour staffed by three professors from the college's extension department, the five-car train (one lecture car, three exhibit cars, and one Pullman) made short stops in each town for a total of seventy-two lectures given by the faculty to dairy farmers. Complete schedules of this and other such "missionary" trains appeared in the Industrialist,(2) and special trains, concentrating on single aspects of farming that ranged from alfalfa, corn and wheat, to poultry, are found in the records at Kansas State for the remainder of the decade, including dairy trains over Santa Fe lines in 1906 and 1909. But it is not until 1912 that the first missionary train promoting the gospel of diversification makes its appearance in these records of the agricultural college.(3) The records in the Santa Fe Collection at the Kansas State Historical Society contain only passing reference to the 1912 train and to a 1916 train labeled the"Hessian Fly Special." (4) The first train to promote the mission of diversification, for which there are records in the Santa Fe Collection, is the "Cow and Hen Special" run by the Santa Fe in March 1917.
No sooner had the 1917 train made its run than World War I intervened and the activity was suspended for the duration. In fact, it was not resumed until well after the railroads were denationalized after the war. The first such Santa Fe demonstration train to run in the postwar era was the 1922 "Cow, Sow and Hen Special," more elegantly referred to by William Allen White as "The Lady Special." This special train, only a few cars in length, featured representatives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture as well as state agricultural officials. Together they brought the good word to farmers along the Santa Fe, preaching the doctrine of better farming - diversified farming.
Conditions were favorable for a heavy volume of freight traffic during the 1920s, more than offsetting the decline in passenger revenue during the same period. A significant portion of the freight volume was the direct result of such careful cultivation as carried on by agricultural demonstration trains from 1922 to 1937. With these trains, agricultural experts were able to directly inform farmers of the latest techniques in farming, as well as emphasize the advantages of diversification from adding cows, sows, and hens to their farming operations. As the farmers' productivity increased, so too did the railroad's tonnage of farm products. Welcoming this increased demand for its services, the Santa Fe improved loading facilities system-wide and offered faster shipping of livestock. The railroad's agricultural department was the primary conduit of all this activity: it had been organized in 1910 to promote the growth of farming all along the Santa Fe by helping farmers learn new scientific methods of farming.
The central figure in this rural drama was editor Jarrell. By the fall of 1919 he anticipated the end of federal control of the railroads, and made arrangements to leave his job of over two years with the United States Railroad Administration (USRA). At the same time, he began negotiations with E. J. Engel, vice-president of the Santa FE in Chicago, to regain his old job in publications. Demonstrating his resourcefulness, he offered to obtain for Engel the lists of those who had inquired about farm opportunities in the states served by the Santa Fe. These were on file in the agricultural section of the USRA, and could from the basis for a mailing list if the Santa Fe's agricultural publication the Earth was revived. He made Engel an offer he could not refuse; before leaving the USRA Jarrell copied the list and sent it to Engel.
Before December was half over, Jarrell learned from C. L. Seagraves, supervisor of agriculture for the Santa Fe, that Engel was indeed contemplating reinstatement of the Earth. It was only a question of when control of the railroads would return to the private sector. Two months into the new year, Jarrell was able to tell a friend that he was returning to the Santa Fe to be editor of the Earth; in addition, he would be in charge of publicity for the entire system (now operating in thirteen states). He would be headquartered in Topeka.
Two years later Jarrell had accumulated the following statistics on the job: he had seen 522 editors and 137 county agents, visited 9 state universities and agricultural colleges, made contact with 211 chambers of commerce, given 134 talks, written 3,241 items, had 972 items about the Santa Fe in newspapers in the several Santa Fe states, and amassed 5,885 clippings of publicity for the railroad amounting to over 250,000 lines of reading material. (5) The biggest single publicity project of a local nature during this period was the 1922 "Cow, Sow and Hen Special" demonstration train in Kansas. The resulting files of stories on that train alone made a file one-foot thick.
Anticipating the resumption of such demonstration trains, H. M. Bainer, agricultural and industrial agent for the Santa Fe in Topeka, described, in his official report to Jarrell in 1921, "The Lady Special" of 1917. ." (6) That train ran during the second week in March, in cooperation with the extension department of the Kansas State Agricultural College (KSAC). Two speakers and four cows were provided by the college - one speaker each on "Dairying" and "Farm Poultry," and the cows were featured in the livestock exhibit. The college paid the professors and fed the cows; the railroad picked up the rest of the tab.
According to Bainer, "the train [of 1917] was run at an opportune time. "Poor crops and decreasing yields during recent years were making Kansas farmers think. He declared that a 1922 special would do much to "hurry around" a change in farming methods that would in turn demand more and better dairy cows, more hogs, and more hens. He felt Kansas could be "brought back to a higher state of Fertility" and at the same time provide better markets for her products. "Daiying," he said, "is at the point where it is about to force itself on Eastern Kansas farms and many farmers realize it. ." (7)
The "Cow and Hen Special" of 1917 was made up at Newton, with one Santa Fe horse car for the four cows, one flat car for demonstration purposes, one baggage car for poultry, three coaches for meetings in case of bad weather, and one business car to accommodate the speakers and attendants. Escorting the four cows (a Holstein, an Ayrshre, a Guernsey, and a Jersey named Canary Bell, Sultana's Tipsy, Flower of one Fontaine, and College Daisy) was an Ayrshire bull. The thirty-one exhibits (lent by twenty-nine farmers and breeders) included twenty-two varieties of poultry, turkeys, and ducks. Jarell had been involved in this train, and according to him, the publicity for the train was the best ever (it is unclear what he used for comparison). One hundred nine stops were made, with an average attendance of 366 per stop for a total attendance of nearly forty thousand train visitors."(8)
This article was originally published in Volume 10 Spring 1987 Number 1 Kansas History. It is republished here with the permission of Constance Libbey Menninger and the Kansas State Historical Society. You may visit the Kansas State Historical Society for more information about Kansas History Transcribed in altered form for the web by Russell Crump.
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