ORGANIZATION 45 



been looking for, ready fashioned for their hands; and as a 

 consequence the new order swept over the states of the North- 

 west like a prairie fire. 



Kelley, on his trip to Minnesota, succeeded in disposing of 

 four dispensations for the establishment of subordinate granges 

 at the regular fixed price of fifteen dollars each, but only one of 

 these resulted in a permanent grange. He had been corre- 

 sponding for some time with A. S. Moss of Fredonia, New York, 

 and with his help succeeded in establishing in that place the 

 first regular, active, and permanent grange. Two of the dis- 

 pensations, those for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Columbus, 

 Ohio, were paid for by men who agreed to work up a grange 

 in these places, but nothing came of their efforts. The fourth 

 dispensation was issued to a grange gathered together by H. D. 

 Emery, editor of the Prairie Farmer, in Chicago, which, however, 

 failed to develop. Kelley had already borrowed fifty dollars 

 from McDowell at Wayne, New York, and now, after another 

 unsuccessful attempt to establish a grange at Madison, Wis- 

 consin, he was obliged to borrow fifteen dollars from the master 

 of the Masonic lodge there in order to get to his home at Itasca, 

 Minnesota. He seems to have made the mistake of attempting 

 to introduce an agricultural order by working in the large cities 

 instead of getting out among the real tillers of the soil; and it 

 was not until after he returned to his farm in Minnesota and 

 began to work among fellow farmers that any real success 

 attended his efforts. 



Fortunately perhaps for Kelley, though he complained about 

 it at the time, the members of the so-called National Grange 

 at Washington began to lose interest in the work and left him 

 pretty much to his own devices, with the exception of calling 

 on him occasionally for money with which to pay printing bills 

 long past due in Washington. Kelley, thus thrown on his 

 own resources, soon found himself so embarrassed that at times 

 he could not even buy stamps for his correspondence; but he 

 never lost faith in the order and continued to keep up the delusion 

 of a great national organization at Washington by circulating 

 photographs of the founders and issuing grandiloquent circulars. 



