While the expansion of urban gardening in Olympia would seem to be a modern phenomenon, since the city passed more permissive rules just recently, the actual history of urban gardening dates back much further.
In February of 1917, the Olympia Civic Improvement Club took aim at several issues facing the growing city, including sanitation and unsightly vacant lots. Their solution was to encourage city residents to plant vegetable gardens in vacant lots throughout the city. Not only would the gardens encourage frugality, but they would serve to beautify the city.
By later that spring, the Olympia Chamber of Commerce was getting into the urban garden game as well, acting as an intermediary between property owners and prospective gardeners. The Chamber would take management of several vacant lots and then dole them out to residents for gardens.
Economic uncertainty for West Coast residents was one of the impacts of the United States’ entry into World War I. While America’s involvement in the war had been discussed for years, the country entered fully into the conflict in May 1917.
At about the same time, the garden plans for Olympia had reached full Great War preparation. Unfortunately, some of the new garden plots were being trampled on by people looking for shortcuts. Underneath a headline of “Teach ‘em Patriotism,” the morning edition of the Olympian opined that, “It is a nightly poor brand of patriotism that will allow any man or woman to deliberately ruin untying that might prove to be useful to the government, state or city. A trail across a half block garden might ruin half a sack of potatoes and that is just that much loss to the community.”
Police began marking off the boundaries of the newly planted garden plots to try to keep trespassers at bay, but the newspaper reported the no-trespassing signs were being quickly removed.
Olympia wasn’t the only city charging hard for more gardens in 1917. In nearby Portland, city leaders divided the city into 54 garden districts, each of them with a local leader. According to the Oregonian newspaper, there were “hundreds of families in Portland of modest means who should plant gardens, for isn’t it true that the returns from any well-kept garden materially assist in holding down living expenses?”
Even in relatively older cities like Philadelphia, there were reports of self-sustaining farmers gardening over 30 plots, and a city-wide gardening program feeding 800 families. By 1919, more than 5 million gardens were growing over 500 million pounds of produce throughout the country.
Back in Olympia, by December 1917, the organizers of the campaign looked back on their success in urban gardening. A story in the Olympian stated that “Last year the ‘Grow your own’ campaign met with wonderful success. People who had never tasted green vegetables that their own labor produced, found a new joy in garden year.”
The plan was to further expand the garden program by identifying every piece of available land in the city and having a garden plan in place for it by January. The organizers expected they would start dealing with a vegetable surplus, which could be sold to the government.
