CHICAGO — Some 40 years ago, the historian for the Mount Greenwood Chamber of Commerce led a movement to save Chicago’s last farm.
The Chicago Board of Education was considering selling the land to real estate developers, so Joe Martin organized a letter-writing campaign, petition drive and media blitz because, he said at the time, the community “would feel a great loss if the farm ceased to produce necessary food.” Not only did the board decide to keep the property at 111th Street and Pulaski Road; it opened an agricultural high school to ensure that more generations of growers would harvest vegetables there.
Now the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences is celebrating the 175th anniversary of the farm, which has survived Chicago Public Schools financial woes, brutal winters and deadly pandemics since the deed was executed on Dec. 11, 1846.
“I look at the pictures of the farm 100 years ago, and there’s cattle and there (are) pigs and there (are) chickens,” Principal William Hook said. “We’re still growing corn. We still have a market garden. We still have a farm stand. All of those things that they were doing, you know, over the last 175 years, we’re still doing. We’re just doing it in a different way with technology, and we’re doing it with different people. We have students who are interested in agriculture instead of people who are full-time farmers.”
Hook said the land has not “fundamentally changed” since 1846, though the community surrounding it certainly has. Mount Greenwood — in the far southwest corner of the city — was first populated in 1830 but didn’t experience a notable influx of settlers until the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, according to Martin’s records.
Martin, the Mount Greenwood historian, credited the “farsighted” Board of Education with “visualizing the extension of the city limits to distant points where schools would be needed” in purchasing the 129-acre farm for $79 in a sheriff’s auction.
Two German immigrants were the first farmers to arrive, in 1863. They each leased 80 acres for the annual price of 50 cents per acre. They cleared the land and built homes while also suffering hardships such as pest-infected crops and difficult travels into the city.
The century that followed saw new families rent the land, which was carved and sold to the Archdiocese of Chicago, the Chicago Park District and others. The farm is now just under 79 acres, Hook said.
Peter Ouwenga had been growing and selling tomatoes, onions, corn and other vegetables for decades there when the board made noise about dumping the site as it faced fiscal crisis. Martin, a Hungarian immigrant who founded the Mount Greenwood Historical Association, formed the Citizen’s Committee to Save Chicago’s Last Farm and urged the board to consider the “extreme importance historically” of the land.
Thousands of people expressed support for the yearslong campaign, and the board announced in 1983 it did not wish to sell the farm. A new plan formed.
Ellen Summerfield Russell said she was working in CPS’s central office when she was approached by a district official about becoming principal of a new high school.
“And I said, ‘Well, what kind of a high school is it?’ I had just passed the principal’s exam, and I had just gotten my Ph.D. So he said, ‘Well, it’s agricultural science,’” Russell recalled.
“And I said, ‘Well, what is that?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s about plants and animals.’ And I said, ‘Well, I have an urban garden behind my condo in Hyde Park. I like gardening.’ And I said, ‘I like animals, so, I guess, yeah, I’d be interested.’ That’s how I said yes.”
Russell said she was given a year to design the curriculum, hire teachers and recruit students. Walter Biddle Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences in Philadelphia — the first of its kind in the United States — was the model for Chicago’s school and the inspiration for the creation of its agribusiness advisory council, which Russell said led the way for campus expansion.
For its first year, in 1985, the school was said to have received more than 500 applications for about 150 freshman spots. School officials at the time touted the number of girls who signed up. Many of the students endured long commutes to the farm.
