Friday Farming: Katheryn Freeman, the only woman in The New York State School of Agriculture at Farmingdale, Long Island, first graduating class.

Kathryn Freeman

The New York State School of Agriculture at Farmingdale, Long Island
Class of 1919
March 19, 2019

By April Lynne Earle

Kathryn Freeman was the only female graduate in the first graduating class. It might have been easier to say that she was the first female graduate, but the there is something to be said for being the ONLY female.

An interesting short portrait.  Including these interesting items:

Kathryn stated in the July 19, 1919 issue of Country Gentleman that, “I was born to be a farmer. I have always known I should do this, ever since I could tell a seed from a pebble.”

And apparently upon graduating she did work farming, in Montana, for a time.  But then this:

Kathryn did go out west. She worked for a short time on a ranch in Montana, after graduation. She then returned to New York, and during the Great Depression, in the 1930 census, she is listed as a landscape architect living on 5th Avenue in Manhattan.

As a deaf Jewish woman farm  hand in Montana, she must have seemed eccentric in the extreme at the time.  Even now a relocated female New Yorker farmer in the west would be unusual.

Ultimately she wasn't a farmer, but she did have an occupation related to the outdoors.  Lots of small farmers have failed over the years, and lots still do.  Coming from the outside into farming isn't easy.  I wonder if she regarded her career happily, or as a disappointment, in how it worked out.