As a 4-H faculty member, Jan Scholl creates innovative, fun projects used by 4-H’ers throughout the state. But this year, while most 4-H’ers have been celebrating a year of centennial nostalgia, she’s been collecting stories and memorabilia and researching the history of 4-H in the state. She knows that history is a lot bumpier than most people remember.

As a member of the Pennsylvania 4-H Centennial Planning Committee, she’s had to confront some of those bumps directly. For instance, when, exactly, is the 4-H centennial?

Pennsylvania 4-H Club members at the State Farm Products Show in Harrisburg, January 1929

“When I first asked why this was the 100th year, someone explained that it was because 1952 was the 50th year,” Scholl says. “The year 1902 is rather arbitrary, because many people started activities similar to 4-H years earlier. But in 1902, A. B. Graham—one of the founders of 4-H—organized a club that was one of the first to meet away from the school grounds and involved experiential and experimental activities unlike the rote learning that often took place in classrooms. This made it a distinct and separate organization from school-sponsored activities, and that’s probably why we’re celebrating 2002 as the centennial.”

4-H became one of the earliest research technology transfer systems. Agricultural innovations like crop rotation were brought out of the laboratory and put in use on the farm by teaching them to farmers’ kids. But for many 4-H youth of that time, raising crops, livestock, and food preparation was also a way to make enough money for modest financial independence—and even to attend college.

“4-H taught kids to be independent and to improve their living situation on a small scale by improving their rooms, their homes, and their family farms,” Scholl says. “Projects could help them make enough money to go to college, and in a time with few scholarships and no student loans, that was a big deal.”

Economic empowerment was a major theme in Green Promise, one of two feature films focused on 4-H. Natalie Wood starred as a young girl struggling to succeed, bringing major star power to the 1949 RKO release and reinforcing 4-H’s status as a respected and accepted part of American culture.

The other feature film, Young America, was a 1942 20th Century Fox release starring Jane Withers. Both were major Hollywood productions, and they were the most notable in a host of films and novels that drew on the 4-H lifestyle as a source of drama.

“Most stories had two main plotlines,” Scholl says. “Farm family moves into town because they know nothing about crop rotation and thus ruined the previous farm they tilled. Father has no money and is trying to farm more land. They don’t listen to the county agent, so some disaster is impending. There’s usually a struggle, and it’s usually the neighbors who take the family in and help them join 4-H, which saves them from the impending disaster.

“The other plot is the spoiled city kid who comes to the farm of a strong 4-H family. The city slicker is, of course, won over, and learns what 4-H is about. In one book, the girl says she won’t join 4-H. By the end, she’s been sold on the idea and winds up being the most gung-ho, committed 4-H member.”

In addition to Hollywood releases, the U.S. Department of Agriculture produced more than 30 4-H films, which survive in the National 4-H Archives in College Park, Maryland. Scholl sees the books and films as an indication of the pervasive influence of 4-H in American culture.

“It’s incredible; we don’t realize how big an organization this was—and is,” she says. “People tend to see 4-H as an agricultural movement. It still is, but it has changed along with the times. It is truly one of the cutting-edge movements of the last century, because it tries to meet the needs of both young people and adults.”

—Gary Abdullah