Par Excellence

The world has known many famed farmers, but there has probably been only one man who made himself famed by farming. He died last week. He was born on a farm -- in Wisconsin, 1846. He fought in the Civil War, and then, stepping westward, he crossed the Missouri River on the ice. On the far side was Kansas. There he got a job at $12 a month, as a farmhand. Four years later he had a farm of his own. There he stayed for twelve years, making things grow. Then he undertook to edit a livestock journal, and the publicity which followed gradually began to make him -- Foster Dwight Coburn-- famed. From 1894 to 1914 he was Secretary of the State Board of Agriculture-- an elevated post! But he knew his business. He was offered an appointment to a vacancy in the U. S. Senate, refused it. Politics was not his business. He began to preach the doctrine of diversified farming. He "discovered" alfalfa and was a prophet of lucerne, as it was then called, when it was still unknown among its own people. His books, his pamphlets, his articles, went broadcast over Kansas, over the U. S., beyond the continent. They had fetching illustrations, wonderful titles: The Corns that Kansas Farmers Have, Alfalfa's Affinity, The Hog's Happy Habitat, The Beef Steer and His Sister, The Helpful Hen. Some of his work went out at his own expense, some at the expense of the State. Once the Kansas legislature, fearful of the way he overshadowed it, denied him his annual appropriation for postage. There is a story that once a letter from England addressed "To the Man who made Kansas Famous" was promptly delivered to him by the Post Office Department. He did a lot for farming. He did as much for Kansas. When he died William Allen White eulogized in the Emporia Gazette: "He was the most useful Kansan of our time."