Oliver Hudson Kelley

• Oliver Hudson Kelley
• Born: January 7, 1826
• Died: January 20, 1913

Founder of the Patrons of Husbandry, or Grange, was born in Boston, the fifth child of William Robinson Kelley and Nancy (Hancock) Kelley. His father, a tailor, was the grandson of Thomas Kelley, who had emigrated to America in 1755. After attending the Boston public schools, Oliver Kelley migrated to Illinois, where he became first a drug clerk and then a newspaper reporter.

After operating a telegraph in Iowa, Kelley went to Minnesota in 1849, married Lucy Earle, who died in 1851, obtained land in Itasca (now Sherburne County) near the Elk River, and traded there with Indians. In 1852 he married again, to Temperance Baldwin Lane; they had four daughters. Temperance Kelley, also from Boston, taught school. In Minnesota Kelley began to gain contacts nationally, corresponding with eastern newspapers about the virtues of his new home state. He gained some reputation as an authority on rural conditions and his report on Minnesota appeared in a document of the United States Commissioner of Agriculture in 1863.

Kelley was appointed as a clerk in the Bureau of Agriculture in 1864. Keeping his farm, he went to Washington to work at his new job and also to solicit correspondence for the National Republican, writing letters to request favorable information about Minnesota with which to attract migrants to his state. The bureau sent him back to Minnesota in 1865 and to the South in 1866, both times to inspect the agricultural situation.

As an inspector, Kelley thought a good deal about the problems farmers faced in different regions. He encountered intense suffering in the South, largely as a result of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He also detected tendencies in planting that contributed to the overproduction of cotton. His southern trip crystallized observations about agriculture he had previously developed, and in 1867 he wrote a historic letter to William Saunders of the Bureau of Agriculture, outlining his proposal for a national Grange movement. He focused on the need for an organization to propagate “book farming”—new methods of progressive agriculture reported in books and magazines that farmers largely ignored and proposed a secret order that would use appropriate rituals and have degrees of membership. He recommended also that women be admitted as members, but not be permitted to attain the same degrees as men.

Conditions were ripe for the introduction of such a new group, especially in the Midwest, where changes of soil, climate, and market facilities required a change from the disastrous one crop method to a more intensified and diversified agriculture. In addition, the new railroads, rapidly spreading, were gaining economic and political control over rural areas, and sometimes over farmers themselves, as they sold shares in return for mortgages on farms. Rate discrimination by railroads worked against midwestern farmers, and a large increase in the area’s population in the 1860s enhanced the appeal of a self-help organization of farmers.

But at first Kelley found it necessary to cultivate support for the idea itself; for this purpose he used his well-developed talents as a correspondent, organizing—and recruiting many others to organize—in many states. Shaking off initial discouragement at the failure of the new movement to rise immediately, he wrote continually to papers like the Rural World of St. Louis and the Prairie Farmer of Chicago.

In 1869 the National Grange met for a preliminary first session in Washington, D.C., with six delegates present. But the growth by ten new Granges in that year presaged a rapid increase to 130 in 1871; by 1875 the order had become a mass movement with 23,000 local Granges. Kelley, as national secretary, had contributed immeasurably to the success of his own idea, traveling alone on borrowed funds from town to town.

The meteoric growth of the order, however, stemmed less from Kelley’s ideas concerning agricultural education and fraternal togetherness than from the implicit potential of the organization as a weapon with which farmers could fight the railroads, bring about regulation of monopolies, and reestablish control over their own lives. Depression hit farmers in the 1870s and strengthened their receptiveness to the organization, which spread most rapidly in the Midwest and the South, areas with differing agricultural conditions but with many common grievances. J. D. McCabe (under the pseudonym of E. W. Martin) publicized the antimonopolistic appeal of the order in his History of the Grange Movement. (1873), and Kelley, its founder, in his Origin and Progress of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry (1875) anecdotally recounted his own developing views and the birth of his movement.

Under Kelley’s leadership the National Grange was permanently organized in Washington, D.C., in 1873, in the midst of its rapid growth. As he moved the national office (along with his entire family) to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1875, the Grange was already on the brink of a precipitous decline. Internally, it faced factionalism, which was spurred by the view of many members that both membership dues and the salaries of officers were too high. Furthermore, many of the Grange’s overelaborate state and local cooperative projects caused disarray; only in Oregon did distributive cooperation become successful.

Structured as a ritual order, devoted ostensibly to education, the Grange was not suited to lead the antimonopoly efforts that many farmers felt were needed. But it did set the stage for the eventual rise of the farmer alliances (and, thereafter, the Populist party), which crystallized those efforts. The Grange, though not explicitly political, took a position supporting regulation of the railroads and lobbied with varying success in state capitals and in Washington for farmers’ needs. It also contributed to diverse attempts at independent political action by farmers in many states. Its official temporization on the issue of woman suffrage could not offset the fact that women were Grange members.

Kelley left his position with the Grange in 1878, becoming a farmer once again, without conspicuous success. But he spent his last years in Washington on a pension awarded by the Grange in 1905. He died there at eighty-seven. Officers of the Grange, which still persisted throughout the nation (and persists to this day in Washington), dedicated a monument to him in Washington, in Rock Creek Cemetery, in 1926. Oliver Hudson Kelley has significance as the founder, organizer, intellectual formulator, and prime leader of the first national, and successful, agricultural reform organization in post-Civil War industrial society.

Biographical sources include The Dictionary of American Biography (1933); S. J. Duck The Granger Movement (1913); and T. C. Atkeson, Semi-centennial History of the Patrons of Husbandry (1916). An obituary appeared in The Washington Evening Star, January 21, 1913.