86 RURAL NEW YORK 



his successor, Liberty Hyde Bailey, represented the at- 

 tainment of agricultural education to equal rank with 

 other academic courses, and the agricultural writings 

 and publications of the latter have been a leading 

 force to popularize agricultural practice and rural 

 life, and to give it a standing in the literature of the 

 day. The Station at Geneva, which was one of the 

 first in America that was well organized and took up a 

 carefully considered program of experimentation and 

 investigation, had as its first director E. L. Sturte- 

 vant, who was succeeded in 1887 by Peter Collier, 

 who in turn was followed by W. H. Jordan in 1895. 

 The beginnings of the farmers' institute movement 

 are hazy and are lost in the miscellaneous lectures on 

 agriculture that began at a very early date. The or- 

 ganized movement commenced with a series of meet- 

 ings of practical farmers with the agricultural teach- 

 ers at Ithaca in 1886. Out of this grew the scheduled 

 series of lectures on agriculture by successful farmers 

 and by members of the staff of the agricultural insti- 

 tutions, under state financed subsidy. The institutes 

 were for many years administered by the State De- 

 partment of Agriculture. On the death of the last di- 

 rector, Edward Van Alstyne, whose sturdy teachings 

 reached beyond ilie bounds of technical farm prob- 

 lems into the larger social and spiritual domains of 

 rural life, most' of this work was transferred to the 

 supervision of the State College of Agriculture at 

 Ithaca. This occurred in 191T after the extension 

 movement had been established on a national basis by 

 the Smith-Lever Extension Bill enacted bv the Fed- 



