By the early 20th century, the answer in Sumter County was the establishment of the Third District Agricultural and Mechanical School, which would later be renamed to GSW University.  This essay will explore the gender, racial, and regional politics that surrounded early experiences of college life at GSW.

By the late 19th c., traditional forms of small-scale farming were not as profitable in the South as in past years so public leaders began to debate how best to support agriculture. Before the rise of new agricultural programs in higher education, people in the agribusiness would use the above mentioned “farmers’ almanacs” to educate themselves on new implements, seeds, and cultivation techniques. These publications would come from a variety of authors and publishers. One such example was from an African American farmer named Benjamin Banneker whose almanac focused on Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Other almanacs came from immigrants or overseas British publications. Since each almanac had a different author there was no fixed source of information for farmers.  The passage of the Morrill Act of 1862 provided the first significant support for federally-funded education in agriculture and mechanical arts. This act would ultimately help fund the creation of the Third District Agricultural and Mechanical School in 1908, with the goal of modernizing agricultural education in the southwest region of Georgia.

The opening of the Third District Agricultural and Mechanical School was a highly anticipated addition to Americus and Sumter County as reported by the Americus Time Recorder which noted that “considerable sacrifice was made to get the school located here.” GSW started as a co-educational whites-only college, but with only token attention to girls. Upon its opening on January 6th, 1908, around 100 boys and 15 girls were in attendance. A photo of male students working in a field appeared in the local paper, described as “the pride of the city, county and district.” Among the advertisements promoting enrollment for GSW, there was little mention of the curriculum for female students. Instead, ads largely focused on female enrollment numbers and spaces left in female dorms. This is in stark contrast to the countless newspaper articles speaking about male student achievements and high records of enrollment. For example, the March 4th, 1909 edition of the Americus Times Recorder, dedicated the entire third page of the newspaper to depictions of male students participating in blacksmithing, farming, and woodworking activities.

GSW’s promotion of male students centered on men as leaders while ignoring the work of women in supporting the family farm. While southern farming has historically been seen as a masculine industry, the maintenance of a farm has always been a family affair. Women helped tend to livestock, work fields, and sell crops. In contrast, GSW’s agriculture program emphasized modern ‘masculine’ views of farming. GSW “offers superior advantages to young farmers, mechanics and wage-earners, from eighteen to twenty-five years of age, and who have found from experience that they need to be better equipped by education and training for their life work,” reported the Americus Times-Recorder in 1912, noting, “the course not only prepares young men to successfully operate and manage a modern farm, and secure from its operation results that will compare favorably with any of the professions or other vocations, but also prepares them for any of the ordinary duties of life.”

Race is also important when talking about agriculture. Historically, the southern regions of Georgia depended on slavery and while this would change after the Civil War, Blacks found themselves largely relegated to sharecropping and other forms of debtor tenant farming. Field work was be one of the very few jobs that Black southerners could have. Nevertheless, Black southerners were excluded from gaining a modern collegiate-level agricultural education at schools like GSW. This exclusion reflected local Jim Crow laws that preserved the idea of Black inferiority and hindered Black economic mobility. Black students were not admitted to GSW until 1967, long after the school had moved away from agricultural education.

Ultimately, GSW embodied the ideals of Americus and the Southwest Georgia region in highlighting white masculine opportunities while excluding Blacks and erasing the role of white and black women in farming economies. “Keep the boys on the farm,” declared GSW trustee J. P. Hughes in 1913. As he explained, “to the ambitious boy there is open[ed] further opportunity through the medium of the Third District Agricultural School, of securing a thorough training in the theory and practice of modern, scientific agriculture at the very minimum of expense.”  For Hughes and other GSW supporters, the college functioned as a symbol of state-based efforts to build white rural southern masculine pride in an era of significant economic and social change.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

"3rd Dist. College Opens Tomorrow." Americus Times-Recorder, 05 January 1908, p. 1.

“Fall Term: The Third District Agricultural and Mechanical School.” The Home Journal, 30 August 1917, p. 3.

“Fine Record By School In Year.” Americus Times-Recorder, 04 March 1909, p. 3.

“The Spring Term Of The Third District Agricultural and Mechanical School.” Americus Times-Recorder, 10 January 1913, pg. 3.

“The Third District Agricultural and Mechanical School at Americus.” Americus Times-Recorder, 30 June 1912, p. 28.

“The Third District Agricultural and Mechanical School: Open For The Fall Term.” Americus Times-Recorder, 23 July 1914, p. 3.

“Third Dist. School Equipped to Teach Farming by Tractor,” Americus Times-Recorder, 23 November 1919, p. 4.

Secondary Sources

Paul, Kayli. “Preparing Today’s Children For Tomorrow’s Needs: Agricultural Education In America’s Public Schools.” Drake Journal of Agricultural Law 25 (Spring 2020). https://aglawjournal.wp.drake.edu/past-issues/volume-25/

Reid, Deborah. “Agricultural Education.” In The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, edited by Clarence L. Mohr, p. 34-40. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.