COLLEGE STATION — After 84 years, Zeta Gandy, the oldest surviving member of the first girls’ 4-H club in the nation, still enjoys home-canned tomatoes.
Gandy, a 94-year-old Milano resident, was 10 years old when she joined the first Tomato Club for girls in 1912. It was organized near Milano in the small community of Liberty by Edna Trigg.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the New York Board of Education hired Trigg to conduct an experimental youth program designed to teach girls in rural areas how to preserve foods at home.
Trigg’s Tomato Clubs in Central Texas, coupled with the Corn Clubs for boys established earlier, became 4-H clubs in the 1920s. Today 4-H is the largest youth organization in the country with 5 million members, more than 628,000 of them in Texas.
Gandy recalled that when the tomatoes got ripe, club members would meet at a different home each day to pick and can tomatoes from early morning until late evening.
“But of course we didn’t have ways of getting around much — only in horse and buggy,” Gandy said.
Canning “was slow going,” she said. “I remember going where tomatoes were canned out in the yard. It wasn’t like it is now. You had to pick the tomatoes, peel them, put them in the cans, put the lids on them and put them down in the water and cover them with a board or something heavy to hold them down.”
“Canning was a new concept in those days,” said Chris Holcombe, Milam County agent with the Texas Agricultural Extension Service. “Canning over an open fire was hard work. Even today, anyone who’s done canning knows it’s not easy work.”
Nutrition, disease prevention and economics were important reasons for teaching people how to can, Holcombe said. The goal was to show families how to process and store food at home for the winter.
“In the South, there was no way to keep vegetables and fruits in winter months,” she said. “Up North they had root cellars to keep potatoes, turnips and other vegetables, but down here, vegetables would not keep long because of moisture and insects.”
Each club member raised tomatoes on a tenth of an acre. They had to plant the tomatoes, prune, stake and pick them by hand. Gandy joined the club along with her 18-year-old sister, Luttie Nelson, and about eight other girls.
“I liked raising tomatoes,” Gandy said. “It was a lot of fun.”
Gandy’s father, Jesse Nelson, raised and sold tomatoes in addition to cotton and corn.
“Sometimes I would go into town (Cameron) with my father,” she said. “It would be all day long in the wagon. When we got back (to Liberty), it would be dark.”
Milano then had numerous truck farms that shipped tomatoes to northern states by rail, Holcombe said. Trigg worked with the Milano Truck Growers Association so the girls could get their tomato plants cheap — $1.50 per thousand.
“Trigg knew about growing tomatoes but knew absolutely nothing about canning,” Holcombe said. “Tomatoes were put in the tin cans that had to be sealed with a soldering iron. The cans were then lowered into a container of boiling hot water for processing. Nobody in this part of the country knew anything about it.”
Tin cans were less expensive than glass, Holcombe said. Also, because open fires were used in processing, the heating temperature couldn’t be controlled, so glass would break.
In one of her reports, Trigg wrote that O.H. Benson of Washington, D.C., gave a canning demonstration in Waco in May 1912.
“None of us had ever canned in tin cans,” Trigg wrote. “When he (Benson) ordered cans from dealers he found that cans were an unknown quantity in Waco. He then purchased cans already filled, unsoldered them and resoldered them again, letting each of us do this.”
Trigg mastered the art of canning and taught it to club members. In August 1912, 3,000 people came to Milano to see a canning exhibit of the first Tomato Club.
Gandy dropped out of the Tomato Club several years before she got married at age 16, but she continued to can tomatoes and other vegetables.
“I got a pressure cooker and a sealer and canned about 500 cans of stuff when we used cans,” she said. “And back then that was pretty fast.”
Today, Gandy still prefers growing and canning her own tomatoes.
“The ones you buy are not as fresh,” she said. “The home canned tomatoes are better. I don’t know why. But those are the only kind I like.”
-30-