Ivan M. Tribe, 33°
111 High Street, McArthur, Ohio 45651-1111

In 1902, Bro. Albert B. Graham initiated the rural youth movement that became 4-H.

Bro. Albert Belmont Graham, 1905

For a century the 4-H program has enriched the lives of America's young people. Designed originally for rural youth, the 4-H movement has spread into cities and numerous foreign lands. The principal founder of this movement, who spent much of his later life shepherding and promoting 4-H, was a dedicated Mason who spent some 70 years as a member of the Order. Bro. Albert Belmont Graham had been a township school superintendent in Clark County, Ohio, when he initiated what he first called an Agricultural Experiment Club with 30 members on January 15, 1902. By the time he died 58 years later, millions of boys and girls had claimed membership in 4-H groups.

Albert B. Graham was born on a farm in Champaign County, Ohio, on March 13, 1868. His parents, Joseph A. and Esther Reed Graham, had married the year before, and a year and one-half after Albert's birth, the couple had another child, Leticia, nicknamed Lettie. The family has been described as "average." Joseph Graham, his brother George, and his cousin William all belonged to Social Lodge, No. 217, F.&A.M., chartered in 1852 in nearby Lena. When the children reached school age, both Albert and Lettie walked a half-mile to attend the Carmony one-room school.

Young Albert's youth was severely disrupted on February 2, 1879, when the Graham farm home caught fire and burned to the ground. Joseph Graham suffered injuries during the inferno and died eight days later. The farm had been mortgaged, and Esther Graham was forced to sell it to pay off the debt. With the $1,021.75 left over, she began a new career as a dressmaker in a small home in the nearby village of Lena. The income she received enabled her to rear her two children in modest circumstances and instill in young Albert a determination to improve his lot in life through additional education. At 17, he graduated from Lena-Conover School and the following fall secured a position as teacher at the same Carmony School he himself had attended only a few years earlier. He received a salary of $320 for his first year of teaching and remained at this post for two years.

Aspiring to obtain more schooling for himself, young A. B. Graham enrolled as a full-time student at National Normal University in Lebanon, Ohio, for the 1887-1888 school year. He then returned to Carmony for another term. In the summer of 1889, the young teacher followed in the path of his paternal relatives. On July 11, 1889, he took his Entered Apprentice Degree in Social Lodge No. 217. He was passed to the Degree of Fellowcraft on August 8, 1889.

According to Graham biographers Virginia and Robert McCormick, Graham and a friend aspired to attend Wittenberg University in nearby Springfield. They rented a room and moved to campus, but when the two discovered that they would not be allowed to attend Masonic meetings in town, they angrily withdrew. Graham took a train to Columbus and enrolled at Ohio State University (OSU). Over the holiday break on January 2, 1890, A. B. Graham was raised a Master Mason and remained a member for the next 70 years. He also joined the Odd Fellows Lodge in Lena and the Knights of Pythias in nearby St. Paris. Illness soon forced the young student to drop out of OSU, but in mid-March he took over as principal of the Lena-Conover School at a monthly salary of $70. This raise in pay enabled him to marry his sweetheart, Maude Lauer, on August 14, 1890. The marriage endured for 60 years until Maude's death and resulted in the birth of five children, one of whom died in infancy.

Bro. Graham spent the remainder of the 1890s as a teacher in various local schools in Champaign, Miami, and Shelby Counties in Ohio. In 1900, he became a full-time Superintendent of Schools in Springfield Township, Clark County, Ohio, at an annual salary of $675. This system consisted of a dozen small elementary schools, mostly of the one-room variety, but some containing two or three rooms. Actually this rural system partly encircled the city of Springfield, at that time a bustling city of 38,000 citizens and a thriving farm implement industry.

As a teacher and administrator, Graham had become a participant in what was becoming known as the Country Life Movement. As the United States became more urbanized and industrialized, many acute observers on the national scene came to believe that rural life had become boring, dull, backward, and stultifying. Farm-reared youth increasingly migrated to the cities to seek industrial work and spend their adult lives in an urban atmosphere, sometimes with negative results. Thus these reformers sought the manner and means to revitalize rural living.

Original 1952 U. S. Postal stamp honoring 4-H

Concurrently, a back-to-nature movement developed in the cities designed to acquaint urban youth with the "ways of nature." These movements resulted in the organization of such groups as Junior Audubon Societies, the Boys Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Camp Fire Girls. Educators pushed such innovations as field trips, classroom libraries, brightly decorated classrooms, and consolidated school districts. To Graham and his contemporaries, a field trip might range from a simple walk near the schoolyard to a journey by streetcar to Ohio State University; each could constitute a valuable educational experience.

Graham's own contribution to the Country Life Movement came in mid-January 1902, when he organized what he referred to as a "Boys' and Girls' Agricultural Experiment Club." The children learned how to do soil tests, develop "experimental plots of corn," and "grow flowers from seeds obtained from Congressman [Brother James] Cox." Within two years, Graham's program was attracting state and even national attention. By the fall of 1904, the Dean of the School of Agriculture at Ohio State Uni-versity reported that there were 16 clubs with 664 members in ten Ohio counties. Bro. Graham's writings and lectures on the program had an effect, and the movement spread even more rapidly due to a series of articles in the journal Agricultural Student.

In the fall of 1904, Bro. Graham took a teaching position in Springfield, but it was only a stopgap job. On April 1, 1905, the Ohio State University Board of Trustees created and named him to the new post of "Superintendent of Agricultural Extension" at Ohio State at an annual salary of $1,500. In this position, Graham made a number of innovations in terms of extension work at Ohio's land-grant college, some of which were later incorporated into the congressional Smith-Lever Act of 1914. This law created the Cooperative Extension Service, a program which several states including Ohio (by the 1909 Alsdorf Law) had already enacted.

Graham used this state position to continue promoting the Agriculture Experiment Clubs. After nine years, he left Ohio, resigning on June 24, 1914, to become Head of the Extension Program at the New York School of Agriculture. Unfortunately Graham's year in New York proved less than satisfactory, primarily because the Empire State's program lacked sufficient organization and proper funding. He quickly became disillusioned but rejected offers to take charge of extension work in Connecticut, South Dakota, and Washington and to return to Ohio. Meanwhile, another offer came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

President Woodrow Wilson signed the Smith-Lever Act on May 8, 1914, creating a federal partnership with state and local governments in the Cooperative Extension Service. Graham received and accepted an offer to become Administrative Specialist in State Relations Service, which allotted funding to states in connection with their own programs. He retained this status until 1922 when he became the man in charge of "Subject Matter Specialists" in the Department of Agriculture. After 16 years in this position, the age-70 mandatory retirement law forced his retirement in March 1938. The veteran educator returned to Columbus where he lived for another 22 years.

Meanwhile the youth movement Graham had started continued growing. Early members in Iowa had used a three-leaf clover with a letter H on each leaf, denoting Hands, Head, and Heart. In 1911, a four-leaf clover with another letter H, for Health was added. In 1918, when the name "4-H Club" came into general use, membership reached a half-million. By 1936, 4-H membership totaled over one million for the first time. In 1974, some 7,000,000 youths were enrolled in 4-H programs. As 4-H historian Franklin Reck once stated, the program was so big and complex that it could not be claimed by any one man. Others who contributed to the early development included W. B. Otwell, Seaman Knapp, Marie Cromer, O. H. Benson, and Gertrude Warren. Yet Graham, must be considered the foremost figure.

As a result, Springfield, Ohio, became the site for issuance of the commemorative stamp honoring the 50th Anniversary of 4-H Clubs on January 15, 1952, the date when Graham's club had their first known meeting. In the remaining eight years of his life Brother Graham continued receiving honors including honorary doctorates from both Ohio State University and Marietta College. In 1957, Graham High School in St. Paris, Ohio, was named for the aged educator.

Bro. Albert Belmont Graham died on January 14, 1960, one day short of the 58th anniversary of the founding of 4-H and 70 years and 12 days after he had been raised in Social Lodge No. 217. Further honors came to him after his death. In 1972, he was chosen as one of 149 "Great Ohioans" to have had the most influence on that state. In 1984, he was inducted into the Agricultural Hall of Fame in Bonner Springs, Kansas. Yet the greatest memorials to Brother Albert Belmont Graham are the popular 4-H Clubs of America. In 2000, their national office estimated membership at more than six million. Furthermore, 4-H Clubs thrive in many foreign nations. Bro. Graham's legacy lives on.

Ivan M. Tribe is a member of Albany Lodge No. 723 in Albany, Ohio, and the Scottish Rite Bodies of Cambridge, Ohio, N.M.J. In September 2000, he received the 33° in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A Knight of the York Cross of Honor and a Professor of History at the University of Rio Grande in Ohio, he was recently appointed Associate Editor for The Encyclopedia of Gospel Music and is a frequent contributor to various Masonic publications, including the Scottish Rite Journal.