Instead of dying, he changed face of farming
When the railroad crossed the Louisiana prairies in 1880, land thought only suitable for wild cattle became accessible to farmers from the Midwest who flocked here to firmly establish Louisiana’s rice industry.
One of those emigres was Seaman A. Knapp, a farmer and educator who was a well-known advocate of progressive farming by the time he came to Louisiana in 1885 – most of his acclaim coming in the decades after doctors gave him only a year to live.
He is recognized as the man who conceived the nationwide Cooperative Extension Service through which demonstration agents introduced new concepts to farmers. He also introduced the growers’ clubs for young people that evolved into the nation’s 4-H Clubs.
He was born Dec. 16, 1832, at Schroon Lake in northern New York, the youngest of eight children of Bradford Knapp and Rhoda Seaman. His father was a farmer and a physician, his mother was of New England Quaker ancestry.
He was 15 when his brother, Alonso, got sick and Seaman had to take charge of his cabinet shop. He learned the trade well. When Seaman said he wanted to go to college, Alonso objected.
He claimed more educa- tion would ruin a fine cabinet maker and turn out a mediocre scholar.
He also thought college was too expensive.
Nonetheless, Seaman borrowed money to attend Troy Conference Academy, a college preparatory school in Vermont, where he met and became engaged to Maria Hotchkiss. She taught at Princeton after graduating from Troy while he studied at Union College, one of the best colleges of the day. They were married after he graduated in 1856 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and they taught at a girls’ school at Poultney, Vermont.
He had an accident while they were at Poultney that badly damaged a leg and threatened to leave him a cripple. When serious infection set in, his doctors thought he could live no more than a year.
Thinking a change of climate might help, he moved to Vinton, Iowa, where he became superintendent of Iowa College for the Blind. He first worked from a wheelchair, but during his eight years there he was able to regain the near normal use of his legs.
He was still on crutches in 1876, when he started a farm and raised prize pigs that he sold to other farmers to start their farms. He also became editor of The Farmer’s Journal and gave speeches all over Iowa preaching high-class stock and good farming. That brought him to the attention of Iowa educators who invited him to become professor of agriculture at the new Iowa State College, where he was appointed president in 1883.
He was invited to Louisiana by Kansas banker J. B. Watkins, who was buying up thousands of acres of cheap southwest Louisiana lowland. Watkins thought he could drain and improve the land, bring farmers to it, and make a lot of money in the deal – which he did. His brother-in-law, Alexander Thomson, came with Watkins, and he lured Knapp to Lake Charles, where he lived for the next 22 years, and spending much of his time showing rice farmers the best way to use Watkins land.
Knapp’s demonstration work began in 1904, when the boll weevil was threatening the nation’s cotton crop. The federal farm agency asked him to go to Texas to show cotton growers how to fight the bug. As part of his demonstration work, Knapp formed Boys Corn Clubs and Girls Canning Clubs in many of the places he visited. His success resulted in a drive for federal aid to bring demonstration work to every southern state. Knapp spent the last years of his life in this effort, leaving Lake Charles for Washington DC in 1907, It was successful and rewarding work. When he died in Washington on April 1, 1911, at the age of 78 – fifty years after he’d been given a year to live – more than 700 Cooperative Extension instructors were visiting thousands of farmers each year and more than 60,000 boys and girls were enrolled in 4-H clubs.
Newspapers across the South called for “a fitting memorial” almost immediately after getting word of his death. The tribute in the Lafayette Advertiser was typical: “No other man in the history of the South ... ever did as much as Dr. Knapp to stir interest in better methods of farming ... and to get [farmers] out of their slavery to cotton. The demonstration work and the corn club work developed under his fostering care for the first time brought our people to see that ... there is no reason in nature why our farmers should be dependent upon a single crop.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
