Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) is a community-oriented organization committed to promoting economic vitality, ecological sustainability, and social well-being. CCE, which has extension offices in every county of New York state, enhances community resilience and prosperity statewide by bridging the research of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and the College of Human Ecology with the public. This summer, I worked with the CCE Madison County office in Morrisville, which offers programs tailored to local needs, such as agricultural education, 4-H youth development, rural health, and economic development.
Cornell University has been New York State’s land-grant institution since 1865, with Madison County becoming an Extension office in 1917. The CCE Madison office possesses a wealth of organization-related archives documenting this extensive history, and my project this summer was centered on exploring these archives. To delve into the rich history of CCE’s work in Madison County, I organized, digitized, and analyzed a variety of historical materials, including newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, internal documents, and photos. Subsequently, I collaborated with CCE Madison to publish these materials in an engaging online database, accessible to the Madison County community.
The goal in creating the website was to highlight some of the most fascinating materials we had in the archives — many of which revealed intriguing insights about old agricultural practices, educational programs, Madison County during WWII, and the role of women in the organization’s history — and to categorize these archives by subject. This way, we could make local history accessible to anyone interested. CCE Madison has a rich history of making an impact locally and nationally. Various archives detailed the organization’s response to environmental and economic crises, and some of the most captivating archives provided accounts of Madison County agriculture’s efforts to meet wartime production targets, as well as the county’s challenges with droughts and blights.
In my studies as an English major at Colgate, I’m particularly interested in exploring “ecocriticism” or environmental literary criticism. In a way, my experience at CCE enabled me to explore that academic interest in environmental literature and writing, which largely involves the interaction between place and narrative. There’s no better way to see that interaction firsthand than by looking at documents from my local community about our region and its farms; CCE Madison’s archives tell stories about the land we live on, work on, and eat from. I’ve learned a lot about society, place, and environment just from the stories of CCE.
I’m also involved in student journalism, so my time at CCE was a fantastic opportunity to be immersed in local media. I was constantly struck by the bold rhetoric of early 20th-century journalism evident in the archives I explored, and even seemingly simple archives, like recipes or meeting minutes, were engaging windows into relatively recent history.
Beyond learning about the dynamic evolution of CCE as an organization, I deepened my appreciation for local history — especially agricultural history — through the opportunity I had as a field school fellow. I’m incredibly grateful for a summer full of learning and the amazing team at CCE Madison. Exploring the archives this summer was nothing short of fascinating, so I’m thrilled that the work I completed with CCE Madison provided a way to share this captivating local history with others.