News Stories

BERKELEY -- Irrigation.  Immigration.  Farm labor.   Fire management.

Many of the same issues making headlines in today’s California newspapers and journals perplexed agrarian writers in the state more than a century ago.  California farmers, settlers and scientists of the 19^th century kept copious accounts of their travels and travails, and their words live on in pages lining the shelves of libraries around the state.  These documents contain information of considerable interest not only to historians but to present-day farmers, settlers and scientists.  The problem isn’t that these documents are gathering dust; it’s that they’re turning to dust.

In a race against time, scholars and librarians at the University of California have been identifying documents produced between 1820 and 1945 as most important for agricultural and cultural historians and most in danger of disintegrating.  Now, library preservation staff members have begun putting the most important of these publications -- some 1,700 volumes -- on microfilm.

The work is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which this summer awarded $154,000 to UC to begin microfilming (out of a total of $908,000 awarded to several universities).  The filming marks the second phase of the collaborative NEH project, to run for the next two years.  The grant has involved some 15 public universities around the country.

In phase one of the project, UC scholars evaluated thousands of available books, journals, diaries, letters, bulletins and selected theses of the period and chose those most worthy of preservation.  (Newspapers and pamphlets under 20 pages were excluded.)  The panelists were UC Davis-based historian Ann Scheuring, author of Science and Service: A History of the Land-Grant University and Agriculture in California, who is now writing a history of the UC Davis campus; UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Kenneth Carpenter, an expert on the history of nutrition; UC Berkeley Professor Garrison Sposito, a soil scientist; and Professor Emeritus Morton Rothstein, an agricultural historian at UC Davis.

“Some of these documents are on the verge of falling apart,” Scheuring says.   “Microfilming them will at least keep them on the record for future consultation.  I myself have had the experience of fingering old periodicals, looking for information and finding I could scarcely turn the pages without tearing them.  I didn’t turn very many!”

 She continues, “I was amazed at the proliferation of farm publications in California around the turn of the century, in particular.   Obviously, it was a very rich time of economic and social development in California, and there were some quite literate farmers and would-be farmers out there.”

The more than 1,500 documents the panel chose for microfilming include the following:

• Treatise on silk and tea culture and other Asiatic industries adapted to the soil and climate of California, 1870.
• San Joaquin and King’s River Canal and Irrigation Company, “The great San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys of California: a great irrigation scheme, 1873.”
• Statement of John Summerfield Enos, Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to the California State Horticultural Society, regarding Chinese laborers, 1886.
• Real estate records of Fruit Vale Estate, circa 1889.
• George B. Sudworth, “Notes on regions in the Sierra forest reserves, 1898-1900.”
• Commission on Immigration and Housing, A report to Gov. Hiram W. Johnson on “the causes of all matters pertaining to the so-called Wheatland Hop Fields’ Riot and killing of August 3, 1913,” 1920.
• Selected periodicals, including California State Grange, Diamond Walnut News, Mercantile Trust Review of the Pacific and The Redwood Reforester.

Other documents describe the planting of the first California grapevines, the impact of the Gold Rush on cattle enterprises and land use and the rise of the braceros and creation of the United Farm Workers.  They come from libraries around the state, including those on the UC Berkeley, Davis and Riverside campuses; the California Historical Society; and the California State Library.  Many were used for research by the very first UC students -- Berkeley students attending the College of Agriculture, the predecessor of today’s College of Natural Resources.
Norma Kobzina, natural resources librarian at the Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library and manager of the NEH project at UC, says funding for phase two “means that we actually get to do something with all the materials we found.  We’re thrilled that we can preserve these documents for posterity in this way.”

The library will make three microfilm copies of each document, with negatives stored by the university and a master film negative kept at the National Agricultural Library in Washington, D.C.  The UC microfilms will be accessible to researchers for local use and interlibrary loan.  The original documents will remain in collections throughout California unless they are too brittle to be usable.

Through this grant, the NEH has awarded a total of $1.75 million to land-grant universities around the country as part of a broader effort, the National Agricultural Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature of the National Agricultural Library and U.S. Agricultural Information Network, established in 1993.   The agricultural history project is being coordinated through Cornell University’s Mann Library.

EDITORS: For more information about the agricultural history project, contact Norma Kobzina at (510) 643-6475 or nkobzina@library.edu.