ISSUE 81, PRESERVING, Part 2: Canning Clubs
Canning Clubs
Sometimes historians dampen interest in certain developments in the past by framing their meaning exclusively in terms of certain historiographical fixations—capitalism, slavery, science, human rights, political sovereignty, and labor. There is more to life and the past than these matters. A case in point is the rather disinteresting commentary that has arisen on the very interesting development, the emergence of “Canning Clubs” in the early 20th century. These groups, promoted by the USDA, in part in connection with the food conservation initiatives during World War I, gave rise to all sorts of good effects: people learned the theory and practice of sanitary food preservation, the home larder expanded with good quality vegetables and fruits, women secured an income stream, some clubs encouraged creativity and the search for novelty products. The club meetings, conducted by female USDA County Agents, made sociability and education synonymous. The Agents working with local grocers provided outlets for specialty products.
Over the years I’ve touched upon the work of these groups of women on numbers of occasions. For instance in their efforts to create and promote new local products such as “Palmetto Pickle” or “Pine Bark Stew,” making them regional sellers. I’ve provide sketch bios of certain of the USDA Agents and Home Demonstrators such as Pearl Napier of Rock Hill SC and Virginia Moore of Knoxville TN, who became forces for cultural improvement and won public regard. The Canning Clubs’ effectiveness is best measured by survival in families and communities of the skills that they taught for over a century. Canning the sanitary “Club Way” have remained central to farm foodways, and historians such as Elizabeth Engelhardt, George B. Ellenberg, Paul Salstrom, and Adrien Lievin had kept them a subject of focus. Think about how completely the contemporary corn clubs, pig clubs, and wheat clubs promoted by the USDA have vanished entirely from public memory.
The bulk of the canning, unsurprisingly, preserved tomatoes, string beans, peaches, or plied the preserving kettle to produce strawberry jam and cherry preserves. There was also a sect of picklers who filled mason jars with chowchow or green tomato pickle. As an Augusta GA commentator wrote in 1917, “In preparing the products which are to be sold, it is well also to put up a large quantity of specialties in comparison with the quantity of plain canned goods, such as tomatoes, since there will then be less competition with commercial goods.” [Augusta Chronicle (September 27, 1917), 10]. A food processing industry had come into existence at the end of the 19th century, and major processors were placing ingeniously branded and brightly label product in local grocery shelves across the United States. Women would make money only when they didn’t try to offer what commercial producers already offered in spiffier containers at a cheaper price point.
The USDA Canning Clubs campaign targeted school age girls, ages 10 to 18, who had access to 1/10th of an acre of land to use as a garden. From 1912 to 1920 these dominated. Older women, seeing the creativity and financial success of the clubs, requested their own associations, and the “Home Demonstration Clubs” sprang into being in 1915, and by 1920 had become established throughout many of the southern states.. During the 1910s,the Home Demonstration Agents could be quite ambitious, laying out 4-year plans for gardening, seed saving, and kitchen work. Lucy Critz, agent for Pine Bluff, Arkansas, projected a first year of tomato, lettuce and beans gardening, a second year of tomatoes, beans, bush limas, okra, and asparagus. Year three added carrots and pimento peppers to the foregoing. The final year added spinach and a special garden product of the club’s choice. [“Club Work in County Outlined,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic (February 16, 1919), 12.] Quite a number of southern clubs became serious in their productions, pooling money for steam cookers, vegetable driers, and fermentation vats.
How many girls and women were involved in these organizations? No one has calculated the membership. Periodically newspapers published listings of active clubs and memberships, so research might calculate an approximate number. But I would not be surprised if the total membership for the southern states in 1922 was about 92,000. What cannot be denied is that a generation of women learned the proper technique for canning, making it a central feature of home food preservation. It has remained so for the subsequent century.