Overview

This autobiography of the first Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University offers an unconventional account of farm life in New York and the Middle West during the nineteenth century, and of the difficulties attendant upon building up a vital and progressive agricultural college. Born in Seneca County, New York, in 1833, Isaac Phillips Roberts emigrated west-first to Indiana, where he worked as a carpenter until he was able to buy a farm, and taught school during the winters; then, in 1862, to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, in a pioneer wagon with his wife, Margaret, and daughter. In 1869, he became the Superindent of the Farm and Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Iowa Agricultural College at Ames, where he soon became Professor of Agriculture. In 1873, he returned to New York to take a similar position at Cornell University; shortly thereafer, he was made Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Director of the Experiment Station. During his thirty years of service in Ithaca, he wrote voluminously on agricultural subjects, and after his retirement, penned Autobiography of a Farm Boy, initially published in 1916, reissued by Cornell University Press in 1946, and now made available in paperback. He died in Palo Alto, California, in 1928.

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9780801475498

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Isaac Phillips Roberts, prophet of the soil and the fecundity thereof, lived 91 years, 51 of them at one end or the other of Cayuga Lake. His life spanned the years between hit-or-miss farm practice and the teaching of scientific agriculture on the same plane with the classics and humanities. Roberts saw all of these changes, and some of them he brought about. In this book he told of these things-in crisp English prose acquired at spelling bees and from exposure to the music of the King James version. -New York History

Author Information

Isaac Phillips Roberts was born in Seneca County, New York, in 1833. He came to Cornell University as Professor of Agriculture in 1873, and shortly afterward was made Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture andExperiment Station.

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