32 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



we could traverse it with our home-made boats; now only chips and toy 

 boats can be floated exce]>t at rare occasions. The playground is gone. 

 Where there was one child then to enjoy that playground there are now 

 eight thousand chil-dren who ought to have a playground like this, but 

 a near sighted utilitarianism has snatched it away. We have stolen 

 their rightful heritage from them, and when you are discussing so 

 splendidly today the methods of getting a living in horticulture and 

 securing a competence for old age, I would have you think for a moment 

 at what a sacrifice some of us are acquiring what we call betterments 

 through our labor while we are forgetful of the children's playgrounds 

 and the children's rights in play. 



T went to the Agricultural College afterward and there was a play- 

 ground at the college. In those days we didn't know very much about 

 tliat kind of play which is now so important^ — baseball games, football 

 games, and those things — but our play was in Number Seven, a beauti- 

 ful piece of native woodland along the Cedar River. There is where we 

 derived, as college students, the keenest enjoyment. Number Seven, that 

 beautiful riverside forest, was sacrificed some years after in the interest 

 of having a more s^^mmetrical farm on two sides of the lane. But it 

 was a sacrifice with no commensurate benefits and it would be the envy 

 of every student who attends the school now if he could know the beauti- 

 ful times we boys had in that grand piece of woodland. Then, following 

 my school d/iys in the country and before my college course, I was a 

 coilntiy school teacher. My first school was ten miles from home, and 

 I particularly recall the ])eculiar individuality given those school prem- 

 ises by the playground. This attribute ought to give individuality to 

 every school in the Nation. We have been si)ending millions of dollars 

 in devices to place our scholars inside under the most unsanitary con- 

 ditions and have been forgetful of that outside playgi'ound in which they 

 can get the equally important physical development which should be the 

 accompaniment of that brain power for which we arrange a system of 

 education. 



My first school had as its distinguishing characteristic a playground 

 which was eighty acres of virgin timber across the road from the school 

 building. I did not know very much about teaching things inside of 

 the schoolhouse. I was only 17 years old and most of my pupils were 

 as old as I, but I did, from my education in former playgrounds, know 

 something of the woods; of the beauty and variety and grandeur of the 

 woods; of the education that the woods can give to any child, and from 

 that time until this I have rarely passed a year when some one of those 

 scholars has not said to me: "What splendid times we used to have in 

 those woods." They have forgotten much of the arithmetic, the algebra, 

 the grammar and the rhetoric but recall with vividness the details of the 

 playground. Through that education which I was able to give them in 

 connection with woods life I furnished those thirty boys and girls some- 

 thing that stays with them and will stay with them clear to the end, and 

 will be helpful in appreciating that, as our friend from Ohio so well 

 said, "This is God's Avorld." It seems to me from my own experience as 

 a student and as a school teacher that we must not be forgetful of this 

 kind of recreation and educational environment in connection with the 

 develoi)ment of our boys and girls, which should give them some definite 

 knowledge of the attractive features of this world outside of the school 



