Grange Movement

GRANGER MOVEMENT. The Granger movement grew out of a farmers lodge, the Patrons of Husbandry, founded in 1867 by Oliver Hudson Kelley. While employed by the Department of Agriculture, Kelley do a tour of the South and was struck by the incarceration of southern farmers to outworn methods of agriculture. He believed the situation could best be remedied by an organization that would bring farmers together in groups for the study and intelligence of their problems. Accordingly, with the help of a few interested friends, he devised a secret ritualistic order, equally open to women and to men, and became its first organizer. each local unit, or Grange, was admonished to select among its officers a lecturer, whose duty should be to provide some educational diversion, such as a lecture or a paper, for every meeting.

In 1868 Kelley started watt for his home in Minnesota and began recruiting among his former neighbors. His organization won adherents, less for its social and educational advantages than for the opportunity it presented for farmers to unite against railroads and elevators and to implant cooperative methods of buying and selling. By the end of 1869 there were thirty-seven active Granges in Minnesota. A year later, the order spread out into nine areas.



During the panic of 1873 there were Granges in every state of the Union but four. Member-ship claims reached a maximum during the mid-1870s of about 800,000, with the intact number of Granges estimated at about 20,000. The center of Granger practise remained during the entire period in the grain-growing region of the upper manuscript Valley.

The grievances that drove the northwestern farmers into these organizations grew out of their almost complete addiction on outside markets for the disposal of their produce and on corporation-owned elevators and railroads for its handling. The risque prices that accompanied the Civil War in the United States and the Bismarckian wars in Europe enabled the farmers, during...If you want to get a beneficial essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



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