42 THE GRANGER MOVEMENT 



on his trip, with the result that several people wrote to Kelley 

 and manifested an interest in his scheme. 



The work of getting the order under way and preparing an 

 elaborate ritual was now taken up in earnest by a number of 

 government clerks in Washington and outsiders with whom 

 they kept up a correspondence. Kelley, however, seems to 

 have been the moving spirit throughout, although he delegated 

 the composition of several parts of the ritual to others. In 

 November, 1867, three hundred printed circulars l were sent 

 to farmers whose addresses had been obtained, the result being 

 much additional correspondence concerning the order with 

 interested farmers. 



Seven men are usually recognized by the Grange as the "foun- 

 ders " of the order. These were, as a writer in the Popular 

 Science Monthly rather sarcastically puts it, 2 " one fruit-grower 

 and six government clerks, equally distributed among the 

 Post-office, Treasury, and Agricultural Departments." All but 

 one of them, however so a Grange circular asserts were 

 born upon farms. 3 They were O. H. Kelley and W. M. Ireland 

 of the post-office department, William Saunders and Rev. A. B. 

 Grosh of the agricultural bureau, Rev. John Trimble and J. R. 

 Thompson of the treasury department, and F. M. McDowell, 

 a pomologist of Wayne, New York. These men, having worked 

 out a ritual for the order, framed a constitution, and adopted 

 a motto Esto perpetua met on December 4, 1867, con- 

 stituted themselves the National Grange of the Patrons of 

 Husbandry, and elected officers. Saunders was given, the 

 office of "Master" because of his position in the agricultural 

 bureau; Thompson took the office of " Lecturer " ; Ireland, 

 that of treasurer; and Kelley became secretary of the incipient 

 order. Neither Grosh nor McDowell was present at this meeting, 

 but a little later the former was made chaplain. McDowell 

 arrived in Washington on the eighth of January, 1868, and 



1 Reprinted in Kelley, Patrons of Husbandry, 38-40. 



2 Pierson, in Popular Science Monthly, xxxii. 199 (December, 1887). 



3 Origin of the Grange, a leaflet, issued by authority of the National Grange 

 (ca. 1899). 



