In a large rural state, before the advent of radio, much less television or the internet, Washington State University (then the State College of Washington) saw a strong need to communicate research and facts to farmers and homemakers around the state. In 1914, the state authorized and funded a Bureau of Farm Development, headquartered at Washington State College, which is what developed into the Agricultural Extension Service. Federal authorization of such a service for all states followed in 1914. These pioneer extension educators established a philosophy that the department still espouses today: “helping farmers to help themselves.”
The collection consists of various publication of the Agricultural Extension Service of the State College of Washington (also as Washington State College; later as Washington State University). As the goal of Extension was outreach to the public, the majority of these were aimed at informing / aiding either the layman, or at a professional in farming or a similar field.
Home Economics News Service comprises releases for publication in newspapers or on radio, primarily aimed at the homemaker. Agricultural Extension Service News and the Washington State Farmcast comprises similar releases aimed at farming professionals, with the latter solely intended for radio use. Extension Mimeographs are short informative publications on a single topic, often practical “how to” works, and often including illustrations and drawings.
As some of the series were published jointly with other institutions, and as the form of the Extension Service name varied by publications, the originating institution(s) as given in the publication is included as part of the publication title in the container list below. However, ‘Agricultural Extension Service’ and ‘Extension Service’ are simply different ways of naming the same thing.
It should be noted that many items are published without dates. As the copies in this collection were collected by various libraries, many have library date stamps on them, but those are not the date of publication.
The larger series of materials are filed alphabetically by series name, and then chronologically within those. The exception is the mimeographs, which have their own identification numbers and are filed by that. As many of those are later updated and republished, those revised editions will appear out of chronological order. Smaller sets of materials are at the end, again filed alphabetically by series name.
The individual items in this collection (as well as others in these series and
others) should all be individually cataloged and available on line in the WSU
institutional repository,
Additionally, some issues, digitized elsewhere, can often be found online via Google Books or similar tools.
This collection is open and available for research use.
Copyright has not been individually evaluated; anything published with a copyright notice and having the copyright subsequently renewed remains in copyright until 95 years after publication; otherwise materials are likely in the public domain.
[Item description]
State College of Washington Agricultural Extension Service Publications, 1920-1977 (Archives 411)
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
In 2021, WSU’s Owen Science and Engineering Library removed duplicate copies of WSU Extension and WSU Experiment Station publications, and transferred these materials to the WSU Libraries’ Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC). Under a CERES grant, MASC students digitized all the materials which had not been previously digitized, placed them online, and the materials were archived.
University Archivist Mark O’English and student Jean Baker processed the physical materials in 2023, after preliminary work by Anne-Marie Greggs.
The materials originating with the Agricultural Experiment Station(s) were processed separately as Archives 412.
WSU MASC retains parallel and overlapping sets of these series in their WSU Publications collection. Specific items not present here may well be present there. In theory individual items can also be found in the WSU Library stacks proper.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the online catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.