SCHS: Happy Veteran’s Day | National Victory Gardens | Talk, ‘Torpedo In The Water’, 11.9th @ 1 PM

Photo of the Week

FROM THE SCHS LIBRARY ARCHIVES

“How shall we know it is us without our past?”
– John Steinbeck

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Boy Scouts War Garden, Medford, 1918, by Hal B. Fullerton. (From the Harry T. Tuthill Fullerton Collection of the Suffolk County Historical Society Library Archives. Image © copyright Suffolk County Historical Society. All rights reserved.)

To view the Fullerton photograph, please visit the SCHS website.

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During World War I, the Long Island Rail Road and local farmers organized the Long Island Food Reserve Battalion. Sale of food to the Allies became a significant source of income to farmers, and the American entry into the war in 1917 only increased that demand. The New York State School of Agriculture on Long Island (today, Farmingdale State College), chartered in 1912, also played a role in securing materials and labor for area farmers. With many farm laborers drafted to serve in the war, however, high school students and Boy Scouts were recruited to work the farms of Long Island. Local schools cooperated with the effort by lengthening summer break from late May to November in order to maximize the availability of student farm workers.

Hal and Edith Fullerton of the LIRR’s Medford Experimental Farm participated in the Food Preserve Battalion by serving on the committee, providing lectures and canning demonstrations, and assisting with the distribution of seeds, fertilizer, and nursery stock. Edith also operated a canning kitchen for the railroad men who ran the trains to and from Camp Upton. She washed surgical dressings, visited patients, prepared them special baskets of fruit and biscuits, and even devised embroidery projects for the ailing soldiers as a form of physical therapy. Hal became involved in the Boy Scouts, organizing a troop for his son and other Medford boys and serving as scoutmaster and commissioner.

He inaugurated a national victory garden program and assumed the proud title of Chief Grub Scout.

Suggested Reading: The Blessed Isle, by Charles L. Sachs (1991).

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