Since we started the recent series of Footnotes in Kansas, we will conclude the Kansas connection with this footnote. The last two Footnotes (Toto, Emulate) described online research tools that can be used to explore the history of agricultural education and the FFA. The motivation for publishing these Footnotes was the Kansas FFA 2028 project to document their history. Today we will look at additional research tools that are critical for documenting the history of the FFA. I use them frequently in writing the Footnotes.
In the comics, the boyhood home of Superman was Smallville, Kansas. But there is no such town in Kansas. To give some concrete examples of the use of the research tools we are looking at today, I have selected Plainville, Kansas to be our Smallville. Plainville High School does have an agricultural education program and an FFA chapter.
So what do we know about the history of Ag Ed/FFA at Plainville High School in Kansas?
True or False 1. In 1951 A. V. Jackson was the agriculture teacher/FFA Advisor at Plainville
True or False 2. In 1959, at the FFA Barnwarmer, Dorothy Garvert was crowned FFA queen and was kissed by the FFA president, Lyle Marcot.
True or False 3. In 1963 the nickname for the Plainville FFA members was Hack’s Hustlers.
True or False 4. In 1968 Kenneth Conway of the Plainville FFA was named Star Farmer of Kansas.
True or False 5. In 1978 the FFA Sweetheart was Jennafer Nuefeld.
True or False 6. In 1978 the BOAC project was to build a community tornado shelter.
True or False 7. In 1978 the Poultry judging team placed 2nd at the National FFA Poultry Judging competition.
True or False 8. In 1979 the big fundraiser for the Plainville FFA was a rodeo.
True or False 9. In 1984 the Plainville FFA won in the state FFA Triple Crown competition.
True or False 10. In 2023 AaLeyah Becker was the first Greenhand at Plainville to say the entire FFA creed and win a free FFA Jacket.
Where could one go to find the answers to the above questions? The simple answer would be school yearbooks and local newspapers for questions 1-9. These are important documents to use in documenting the history of local FFA chapters.
School Yearbooks
School yearbooks can be a treasure trove of FFA history. Some yearbooks just have photos of the FFA while others have accounts of the yearly activities and identify the FFA officers. About half of the questions above came from the Cardinal, the yearbook of Plainville High School.
Where does one go to find the yearbooks? The high school library would be a logical place to find the yearbooks, followed by the local public library, and then the county historical society. Sometimes I have found yearbooks by doing a Google search. Or one could become a member of Classmates.com.
Classmates.com – was founded in 1995 as Classmates Online, Inc. with headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. Classmates.com has an archive of old high school yearbooks that have been digitized. At Classmates, you can be a free member or a paid Classmates+ member. As a free member, you can search and view yearbooks for free. You can also search for individual names.
Using Classmates.com can be a hit or miss proposition. Some schools have numerous yearbooks online and some very few. In looking for Plainville High School in Kansas (there is also a Plainview High School in Connecticut) I found 31 yearbooks online, starting in 1908 and ending in 1980. That means they don’t have all the yearbooks but do have a decent number. The following are some screenshots from the Plainville, KS yearbooks.
Figure 1. From the 1951 Plainville, KS Cardinal yearbook. The faculty pages in the same yearbook provide the complete name of the agriculture teacher – A. V. Jackson. Note the officer drapes. I wonder if they still have them?
Figure 2. From the 1959 Plainville, KS Cardinal yearbook. I wonder if the P on the front of Lyle’s FFA jacket follows the guidelines for use of the FFA Jacket?
Figure 3. From the 1963 Plainville, KS Cardinal yearbook. Note the name of the group – Hack’s Hustlers. Marvin Hachmeister was the agriculture teacher.
Figure 4. From the 1979 Plainville, KS Cardinal yearbook. A close reading of the text reveals the BOAC project focused on reconstruction of the city park and sidewalk and curbing work at the senior citizens housing center. We also learn the poultry judging team placed 7th in the national contest. Robyn Carmichael was the FFA sweetheart in 1979.
Newspapers
Local newspapers can be a great source for FFA history. Many newspapers have archived files of past newspapers. However, searching through them is time consuming and tedious. There are at least two searchable online compilations of newspapers – newspapers.com and newpaperarchives.com. I haven’t used newspaperarchives.com so I will not be reporting on it.
Newspapers.com – Newspapers.com™ is the largest online newspaper archive consisting of 956 million+ pages of historical newspapers from 25,800+ newspapers from around the United States and beyond. Searching is simple. In the search bar enter the word or words for which you are searching. For this Footnote I entered “future farmers” + “plainville” in the keyword area and entered Kansas in the location block. I could have narrowed my search to a specific date or dates. See Figure 5.
Figure 5. The search bar in newspapers.com looking for newspaper articles about the Plainville Future Farmers in Kansas.
The above search yielded 443 matches. However, this is an inflated number. The first article found in the search contained the words I was searching for 18 times. Also it is possible there could be one article about the Future Farmers and an article about the Plainville city council meeting on the same page. That would constitute a match. It is important to use parentheses to “group words” or the search engine will look for each individual word. If I searched for future farmers + Plainville without the parenthesis there would be 25,855 matches.
Once you find an article you want there is a simple to use clip tool to save the article and there is an option to print the article as a graphic. You can even narrow your search to just a few newspapers. The Salina Journal yielded 167 matches with the Hays Daily News yielding 64 matches for the search shown above.
While I don’t use them often, I find obituaries to be informative. For the Friday Footnote about Stevenson Ching, a national FFA officer from Hawaii in 1938, I was able to track down relatives listed in his obituary to learn more about Stevenson.
The “barrier” to using newspapers.com is that you have to be a subscriber and pay a fee which is $150 annually. However, you might convince the school library to subscribe or take it out of your departmental budget. There is a free seven day trial period.
The following are some articles from newspapers.com that I used in writing this Footnote.
Figure 6. The Salina (KS) Journal, February 22, 1979
Figure 7. The Wichita (KS) Eagle, April 30, 1968
Figure 8. The Salina Journal, June 5, 1984. Even though this article is about Clay Center, it mentions that the Plainview FFA placed 3rd in the state Triple Crown competition in 1984. According to the Kansas FFA website Plainview won this state competition in 1979 and 1986 but not in 1984.
Concluding Remarks
In addition to the resources mentioned in this Footnote and the previous two Footnotes it doesn’t hurt to do a Google search. You can never tell what might appear. Local libraries and historical societies should also be consulted.
The impetus for this and the previous several Footnotes was the Kansas 2028 project to record the history of FFA in Kansas. However, this is something all FFA associations and chapters should consider as we approach the 100th anniversary of the FFA in a few short years. Now is the time to get started.
In case you haven’t yet discovered the answers to the quiz items, 1-4 are true, 5-9 are false, and 10 is true but you would have to look at the Plainville FFA Facebook page to find the answer to question 10. History is being made all the time. It can be current as well as past. Nothing is plain about the Plainville FFA.