Oliver hudson kelley biography

The American agriculturalist Oliver Hudson Kelley founded the Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry and was devoted to improving conditions for farmers. Oliver Hudson Kelley was born and educated in Boston.

Grange definition u.s. history

He went west to Illinois for awhile, then to Minnesota in , where he became a farmer and Indian trader. Kelley's wife died in , and the following year he married a schoolteacher who also had come west from Boston. Kelley quickly became a champion of Minnesota and of the farmer, whom he considered the indisputable source of wealth in America.

Following a drought in , Kelley's Minnesota farm operations became unprofitable, and in he found employment as a clerk in the U. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D. He returned to Minnesota in to prepare a report for the Federal government on agricultural conditions. In January he was commissioned to make a survey of the agricultural situation in the South.

He made a 3-month tour of the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee before returning to his Minnesota homestead. For some time Kelley had toyed with the idea of establishing an organization of farmers for self-improvement, a secret fraternity patterned on the Masonic Order.