SCHOOL GARDENS taught thousands of Cleveland children and adults the joys and challenges of gardening for almost 75 years. Managed by the CLEVELAND PUBLIC SCHOOLS and staffed by trained administrators and teachers, the school system’s nationally recognized garden program fell victim to drastic budget cuts in 1978.
Cleveland’s school gardens were part of the national movement for civic beautification that began in the 1890s, intending to remedy the unseemly disorder and unplanned ugliness of American cities. Gardens, like urban parks, were also meant improve city dwellers’ lives. School garden advocates believed that children, especially, benefited from gardens that would make them healthy citizens with useful skills and virtues and an appreciation for nature. School gardening also meshed well with the mission of early twentieth-century education reformers like John Dewey who maintained that children learned by doing – digging in a garden, for example - as well as by sitting in a classroom.
These ambitious goals attracted wide support for school gardens during their first years in Cleveland. The school district’s program began in 1904 with small summer gardens for elementary students on the grounds of Warren, Outhwaite, Detroit, Willard and Stannard Schools. Cleveland’s Home Garden Association provided assistance the first year, but the school district operated independently after that. So successful was this effort that in 1905, the school system established a department of school gardens with Louise Klein Miller as director. The program expanded to include eight elementary school gardens and students’ home gardens, which would remain an important part of the program. In 1910, the Memorial School Garden opened on the site where 172 children and two teachers had died in the COLLINWOOD SCHOOL FIRE two years earlier. After West Technical High School, the city’s first vocational high school, opened in 1912, its greenhouses became the supplier of plants and seedlings for the whole gardening program. Parochial school students were welcome if they lived within walking distance of a school garden. At annual festivals, the best individual gardeners and best school garden won prizes and got their names published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (PLAIN DEALER). The U.S. Department of Agriculture in praised the school district and its director as leaders of the school garden movement in 1912. The next year, 5,000 children signed up to garden at school or at home; the Cleveland Plain Dealer applauded their contribution to the “city beautiful movement.” As gardening became more closely integrated into the curriculum, science teachers oversaw the school gardens and visited home gardens twice a summer. Children whose gardens received satisfactory grades won a certificate at the end of the season. Contemporary photos show children, from kindergarten to high school, industriously tilling tidy rows of lettuce and radishes or happily harvesting baskets of beans, corn, squash, or tomatoes. Some children preferred flowers, especially in home gardens.
During the next difficult decades, the school gardens continued to serve the community in important ways. In 1918, Cleveland children enrolled in the U.S. School Garden Army, doing their bit to win WORLD WAR I by raising and canning produce. In`1920, the gardens of fifty schools raised produce worth $100,000, according to the new program director, O.M. Eastman. The previous director, Miller, had publicly pointed out that the program needed more land – and land owned, not rented - by the school district so that gardens could be permanent. In 1922, the school board began to buy acreage for the large