Speaking of agriculture and the University of Georgia

Steven R (SC Universalist: A Working History) has been transcribing bits of Southern Universalist interest from Manford’s Monthly magazine, most recently 1879. [He makes an update, corrects Grigsby’s name, and tells us he ended up in D.C. — a story I know well — for most of his career. I’ll have to find evidence of him here.]

Goodness, looky there — Universalist ministers and University of Georgia alumnus I am, I didn’t know the following. If the experimental farm in question is near where the research station was until the 1990s, I must have once lived within walking distance of this farm. The departments of “mechanic Arts” were traded to the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) later in the century for the liberal arts departments they then had. UGA still has a large and well-regarded agriculture college; to the readers of this blog, its most famous alumnus would be Clarence Jordan: co-founder of Koinonia Farms, the core author of the Cotton Patch Version of the New Testament, and spiritual father — if that’s not too bombastic — of Habitat for Humanity.

But first let’s return to 1879:

Georgia. – Rev W. H. [Grigsby], who graduated in 1868 at the Canton Divinity School, is at the present time Superintendent of the Experimental Farm connected with the “State College of Agriculture and the mechanic Arts of the University of Georgia.” He has recently issued a Report which contains a vast amount of scientific and technical information. It is unique among reports of this kind, in that the peculiar genius of the Superintendent runs through every line. Intermingled with phosphates and fertilizers, clearing, fencing, the science o culture, and the organic elements of plants, there is wit, poetry, philosophy and theology, making the report whose racy style will insure its reading. Mr Grisby was for several years private secretary of Alexander Stephens and subsequently Secretary of the Georgia Senate. He has many friends among his old school-fellows who admired his brilliant and eccentric talents.”