PITTSBURGH SCHOOL GARDENS

Emerging from the efforts of educators, community advocates, and government agencies, school gardens have a long and varied history in the United States--and Pittsburgh played a pivotal role!

 

The School Garden Movement in the United States has been traced to 1891, when the Massachusetts Horticulture Society sponsored a wildflower garden on the grounds of the George Putnam School outside of Boston.  In less than a decade, school gardens began to take hold, first across the northeast US and then nationally. Before long, Pittsburgh became one of the cities to watch.  

 

Early Years

In Pittsburgh, school gardens came into existence on the coattails of a related social reform initiative.  Nationally, the Playground Movement was a response to many societal ills: urban overcrowding, poverty, both child labor and juvenile delinquency, in addition to economic and health concerns. The Civic Club of Allegheny County banded with other local agencies to create Pittsburgh's first playground:

 

"So it was that in 1896, when the Civic Club, then recently formed and looking for work, saw the crowded streets and the yardless, forlorn homes of these children, it determined to take advantage of a law enacted the previous year and open the school yards as playgrounds. The first playground was started in a ward settled by middle class people...The playground in this district worked smoothly enough, though the teachers found that the children needed more assistance in their play than had been expected. The committee then entered two mill neighborhoods and met the real difficulty. The members having never lived next to a mill and always having had yards and doorsteps of their own, could not understand that these children did not know how to play. The committee could not believe it. Some of them do not believe it now; they think that the children played while they were not looking."  (Kennard, 310.)

 

Soon, the Civic Club and other organizations joined forces to found the Pittsburgh Playground Association.  During the next decade, the PPA both directed the development and managed a growing number of playgrounds, vacation schools and recreation parks.  Frequently, these public spaces included flower and vegetable gardens: some to be tended to by school children under the supervision of volunteers, others for use during Nature Study, a late 19th Century education movement to connect students to the natural world.  After the success of several such gardens, the Pittsburgh Playground Association officially established the Department of Nature Study and School Gardening in 1909, naming John Leslie Randall the Director.  

 

The Pittsburgh Plan

Under the innagural year of the Department of Nature Study and School Gardening, Director J. L Randall spearheaded multiple iniatives, reported in the PPA 1910 Annual Report:

 

• Expanding the existing bulb and seed distribution program, not only a gardening outreach but also fundraising activity, to include all Pittsburgh Public Schools

• Transforming an old park building into a greenhouse, potting shed and buld cellar to extend the teaching season

• Entering into a collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh School of Education to create a training program for playground teachers, including a credit class taught by the PPA gardening supervisor for credit.