THE ILLINOIS AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION 



D. O. THOMPSON, Secretary, Chicago 



F I were to figure out what seems to me to be the start of 

 the Illinois Agricultural Association, so far as I can get 

 it from the record today, I would go back to the graduat- 

 ing class of '76. If I were a philosopher, I would sit 

 down and meditate upon the question as to whether the 

 state of Illinois could not well have built an institution 

 an educational institution back in those years, for the sole purpose 

 of graduating one student in the year of '76 who would have upon 

 the agriculture of the state of Illinois the influence that that one 

 graduate has had. I believe the investment in the whole institution 

 would have been worth while, just for that one thing. 



Seven years ago in this building, for which the Dean of Agri- 

 culture and the Farmers' Institute worked so hard, there met a group 

 of Farm Bureau officers who had been coming here for a few years 

 with the farm advisers in order to see if there were not a few things 

 which they had in common which they might discuss, and perhaps 

 form a sort of loose organization. Following that a meeting was 

 held at Ottawa. After much discussion and argument, the organi- 

 zation was formed. I think the greatest amount of debate was as to 

 whether it should be called the Illinois Agricultural Association or 

 the Illinois Agricultural and Live Stock Association. Mr. Herman 

 Danforth was elected president. He was president of the Farm 

 Bureau in Tazewell county; and Mr. E. T. Robbins, the farm 

 adviser in that county, was elected secretary of the organization. 

 Some years later Mr. John Kirkton, of the Livingston County Farm 

 Bureau, was elected president and Mr. R. C. Bishop, farm adviser 

 in that county, was elected secretary. Some time later, Mr. Kirkton 

 continuing in office, Mr. Leonard, who was president of the Wood- 

 ford County Farm Bureau, was elected secretary ; and it was during 

 that time, and immediately after the war period, that the Association 

 undertook its largest program of work. The important thing, to my 

 mind, that happened was that the Association, instead of continuing 

 on as an association of groups of farmers, was changed to be an 

 association of individual farmer members. At that time, Mr. Harvey 

 Sconce was elected president, and I was hired as secretary and since 

 that time have been trying to do everything except to get the fellows 

 down East to come out here and eat their pork chops out in the feed 

 lots. 



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