‘Network of Agricultural Rebels’: Uncovering Records of a Food Revolution

Jeffrey C. Sanders is a professor in WSU’s Department of History in Pullman. He is author of Razing Kids: Youth, Environment, and the Postwar American West (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), and McClellan Park: The Life and Death of an Urban Green Space (Albuquerque Museum Press, 2004). Sanders’ teaching and research focus on the relationship between place, politics, and culture in the 20th-century United States. He teaches Pacific Northwest history, environmental history, and research seminars. In his classes, Sanders emphasizes original research projects that draw on rich local primary source collections and oral histories available at WSU’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, helping students consider the layered historical landscapes and people of this region. To learn more about Sanders, see his Department of History profile.

Little did I know that researching a 1970s urban agriculture group in Seattle would lead me hundreds of miles away across a mountain range and to the Palouse. In the early spring of 2005, I was a history doctoral student deep in dissertation mode and trying to write one of the final chapters. It focused on Seattle Tilth, a loose coalition of young people who had built an urban gardening center on the grounds of an old school in a Seattle neighborhood.

On the surface, the collective seemed like just another one of those scruffy, short-lived, hippie-back-to-the-land groups prevalent in the early 1970s. In the wake of Silent Spring, the Whole Earth Catalog, and the regional cult novel Ecotopia, activists like these indulged fantasies of a city remade with salmon swimming in daylighted streams, community gardens in vacant lots, and an endless bounty of organic kale.

We like to believe we are all researchers now, everything at our fingertips, digitized, a click away. It isn’t true. It was especially untrue in 2005. I was surprised but undeterred then when I found that many of Seattle Tilth’s records were only available hundreds of miles from the city in a little town called Pullman at an archive with an intriguing name: “MASC.”

Historians tend to take outsize pride in their efforts to discover documents in far-flung places, tracking down leads, sifting to find nuggets. So off I drove, with my wife and my infant child, over icy highways and through snow-dusted Palouse hills to find this “MASC,” the place where my sources were supposedly located.

Here I thought I was telling a story about the big city. But it turned out to be a narrative of regional relationships. Many founding members of the umbrella group Northwest Tilth discovered their vocation in agriculture programs at WSU and other eastern Washington colleges. Unhappy with the prevailing industrial agriculture system of that period, they launched a countercultural doppelganger of the land-grant mission.

With the help of MASC archivists, I found a trove of records documenting a regionwide network of agricultural rebels: folders stuffed with mimeographed manifestos, impassioned letters between idealistic young students about the health of soil, conference proceedings, and so many newsletters. They put their shoulders to the wheel to change the food system and educated a new generation of farmers and consumers, in city and country alike. The university’s organic agriculture program and the Tilth Association-affiliated WSU Eggert Family Organic Farm owe a lot to these founders.

By stewarding these boxes of sources, MASC made it possible for me (and others who have followed) to piece together this history.

“Is it local?” has become a cliché by now and regional “food security” a prevailing concern. But to trace the origins of these ideas and practices—what it took to launch a food revolution—required that someone hold on to ephemeral things, including dirt- and water-stained farm logs and youthful pronouncements about permaculture from long ago.

By the 1980s, Northwest Tilth and another seedling called Oregon Tilth would play key roles in the organic certification and sustainable agriculture movement in the Northwest and beyond. What I learned was not only the history of this pivotal organization, but also the link between urban and rural places that really animated their work—how they hoped to inform their comrades in places like Seattle and Portland about how to grow their own crops and where most of their food comes from.

I finally finished my dissertation. Two years later, I applied for a position teaching environmental history at WSU. I made the now-familiar drive to campus in late spring for an on-campus interview and got the job. When I began writing the book based on the original research, I could easily check my sources now with my office just steps away from MASC. I had the privilege of visiting the collection at my leisure as I got to know my new colleagues in the libraries.

And so, the seeds of my research and my career, unearthed in a distant archive, ultimately blossomed just across the quad.