Our Own Hall of Fame
A.B. GRAHAM
A.B.GRAHAM LIKED KIDS
4-H Club Founder Started As Rural School Teacher.
DAYTON DAILY NEWS MARCH 23, 1961
BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH
Daily News Staff Writer
In Springfield in 1902, A. B. Graham had what turned out to be a good idea. He founded a club with a dozen members. Today it has more than two million.
The tall, craggy-faced Graham—who was born on a Champaign county farm near St. Paris—believed that youngsters learn by doing. He was both a farmer and a teacher, so he organized what he called the Boys and Girls Agriculture club. From that stemmed what the world today calls the 4-H Clubs of America.
GRAHAM WAS 33 when he recruited the first handful of young people between the ages of 10 and 21 to learn together better methods of canning and corn hoeing and chicken raising.
Behind him lay a public school education in Miami and Warren counties and an 1888 graduation certificate from the Lebanon Normal school--plus a 14-year teaching career.
Graham started as master of a one-room school house when he was 18, but three years after he founded what was to become 4-H, he was named director of agricultural extension at Ohio State university—the first man in the country to hold such a post full-time.
THEN FOR 23 years—from 1915 to 1938—he was busy developing methods of extension teaching for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, serving 18 months at the New York State School of Agriculture (where he introduced his teaching ideas) and working with non-college youth.
Graham founded more agriculture clubs in Clark and adjoining counties. Nights and weekends he went to meetings, pitched in on projects, always had time because, he said: “Young people are all God has to make grownups out of.”
THE AGRICULTURIST–educator was also named to a committee to prepare the initial plan for junior high schools in the United States. The first such school to come out of it was Indianola in Columbus.
Graham pioneered in the centralization of rural schools and was instrumental in setting up the first one at Westville in Champaign county.
As agriculture clubs mushroomed, he traveled tirelessly preaching a doctrine of honesty, integrity, cooperation and a world of good neighbors.
IN 1930 all the clubs patterned after that first one in Springfield were grouped together under the name 4-H. (The H’s stand for things Graham put much store in—head, heart, hands, health.)
After retirement Graham continued working with rural young people and devoting himself to a hatful of hobbies like photography, freehand drawing and sewing.
When he was 90, then Gov. C. William O’Neil officially proclaimed a state-wide “A. B. Graham Day” to honor the father of the world’s largest voluntary youth organization.
A year later, in January, 1960, Graham died from a cerebral hemorrhage—on the day before the 58th anniversary of the founding of 4-H.
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