By ANN HINCH
Assistant Editor

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — In 1914, the University of Tennessee Extension Service had fewer than 40 employees and its first director, Charles Albert Keffer.

Under his 21-year tenure, the Service grew to nearly 300 people, including specialists, an agent in every county and home and assistant agents. It survived a world war and saw the introduction of home demonstration agents to help rural families improve food storage, sanitation and beautification on the farm.

More than 90 years later, UT’s Institute of Agriculture is preparing to publish a history of Extension, a manuscript completed in 1997 and recently revived for editing and updating. Lisa Byerley Gary, a lecturer for UT’s School of Journalism and Electronic Media, has edited and is adding a few postscript chapters to the book, originally authored by Jamie Sue Linder.

Linder, 47, who recently succumbed to cancer (see related article), was looking forward to the book’s publication. “When I found out the book was going to be published, I wanted to let her know,” Gary said, explaining she is juggling the project with a full-time job and is disappointed she wasn’t able to finish before Linder’s death. “I think she doubted it ever would be.”
The book

Linder explained she wrote the book under contract to UT when then-university historian Milton Klein asked her to take over the project. Like Gary, she had to fit the work in around holding down another job.

“She had a real feel for what extension was, and what it could mean to the average Tennessean,” said Gary, who at the time worked for UT’s Institute of Agriculture.

This was easily accomplished, since Linder grew up on a farm. “People don’t realize how much,” Linder said of the importance of extension and its agents, something she tried to emphasize throughout her manuscript. “I mean, they developed the land grant colleges, they brought all the innovations and discovery” – such as refrigeration, ham-curing, sausage-making and flour-based cooking mixes, to name a few – “to country life.”

Sharon Littlepage, then-director of external relations for UT Extension, edited Linder’s articles for the alumni magazine and explained Linder wasn’t even the second person handed the book assignment – just the first to finish it.

“It was extensive,” she said of Linder’s meticulously-researched 143-page manuscript. “It’s hard to get your arms around it. I admire her, because she was able to finish a version of it, more than her predecessors did.”

Littlepage explained the manuscript went the route of many committees and through a few Institute leadership changes for about eight years. Gary said it was one of four books assigned to be written in the 1990s to cover the history of various departments of UT agriculture, celebrating the school’s bicentennial.
Part of Gary’s job was to edit one of the other books. She left UT in 2000 and didn’t have contact again until late 2005, when officials contacted her to put the coda on Linder’s manuscript.

Life experiences
Growing up in rural Tennessee, Linder witnessed firsthand the industrialization of agriculture and the dwindling of small family farms. Her grandparents ran a successful dairy operation for 50 years and embraced practical improvements such as the mechanization of cow-milking.

She fondly recalled the sisters’ girlhood, which included snacking on their grandmother’s strawberries and their own “business” of selling catalpa worms to fishermen so they would have money for the county fair. The girls also learned to hunt and kept the freezer stocked with game. Stories like these, Linder feared, are becoming as sparse as small farms themselves.

All this helped her write for scholars and toward a general audience. Though she notes in her Author’s Preface that “passions can get in the way of judgment” when recording history, Linder also wrote “to be properly inspired, you have to care.” The tone of her manuscript is factual, but she hoped it is also compelling.

“They’ll think it’s not interesting,” she said of the layman, “until they start reading.”

Gary hopes the book will be published before the end of the year, but has no control over that decision – it will likely not be published by UT Press, but by the Institute. She is requesting administrators let her note Linder’s death and explain the author’s background in the book’s postscript.