First Girl's Tomato Club in Texas
Cameron, Milam County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first Girl's Tomato Clubs in Texas were organized in 1912 in Milam County to acquaint young women in rural areas with tomato production and canning techniques. At the request of the United States Department of Agriculture, Mrs. Edna Westbrook Trigg, a local high school principal, agreed to undertake the project. She organized eleven clubs throughout the county, with members ranging in age from ten to eighteen. A similar program for boys, the Corn Clubs, had been instituted in Jack County four years earlier. Each member of the Girl's Tomato Clubs was to produce a tomato crop on one-tenth of an acre of land and then was taught proper canning procedures. The girls exhibited their products at Milano, Rockdale, the 1913 State Fair in Dallas, and the Waco Cotton Palace. So successful were these exhibits that several of the girls started college education funds with the money they raised selling their goods. As the state's first rural girl's organization of its kind, the Tomato Clubs were forerunners of later programs, including 4-H, that were initiated under the supervision of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service. Over time, 4-H has expanded its scope but has maintained the principle objectives of its predecessors.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1912 Milam County launched Texas's first Girls' Tomato Clubs, teaching rural young women to grow and can tomatoes on a tenth of an acre. At the U.S. Department of Agriculture's request, high school principal Edna Westbrook Trigg organized eleven clubs for members aged ten to eighteen. The girls sold their canned goods at fairs from Rockdale to the State Fair in Dallas, several funding college with the proceeds—making the clubs a direct forerunner of 4-H.
Why it matters
This grassroots program opened economic and educational opportunity to rural girls and helped seed the national 4-H movement.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1900s, rural America was changing, and not everyone thought it was changing for the better. Farm families worked hard for thin returns, young people were leaving for the cities, and reformers of the Progressive Era believed education could make country life more prosperous and more appealing.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture took up that cause through farm demonstration work, teaching better methods by having local people try them on their own land. One of its most effective tools was the youth club. Young people who adopted a new practice would carry it home to their parents.
Boys came first, with corn clubs that set members competing to grow the best yields. Texas had one in Jack County a few years before this marker's story. Girls' clubs followed, built around gardening and canning, which could bring cash into a household and improve what a family ate all year.
People & events
In 1912 the Department of Agriculture turned to Milam County, and to Mrs. Edna Westbrook Trigg, a local high school principal, to bring the girls' club idea to Texas. She agreed, and she did far more than start one club. She organized eleven across the county.
The girls ranged from ten to eighteen years old. Each took charge of a tenth of an acre, a patch small enough for a young person to manage and big enough to produce a real crop. They grew tomatoes and then learned proper canning, the careful, science-based preserving that turned a perishable harvest into something that would keep and could be sold.
Then they showed their work. Their jars traveled to exhibits at Milano and Rockdale, to the State Fair in Dallas in 1913, and to the Cotton Palace in Waco. The response was strong, and the money was real. Several of the girls put their earnings toward college, which in rural Texas of that era could change the course of a young woman's life.
Its place in the American story
The tomato clubs belong to a larger movement that reshaped rural America. Youth corn and canning clubs spread from state to state in the 1910s. In 1914 Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act, which created the Cooperative Extension Service to carry the land-grant colleges' knowledge out to farms and homes.
Those clubs grew into 4-H, which became one of the largest youth organizations in the country. The Milam County girls were an early chapter of that story in Texas: the state's first rural girls' organization of its kind, and a forerunner of the programs later run by the Texas Agricultural Extension Service.
There is also a quieter significance. At a time when few paths led rural girls to income or higher education, a tenth of an acre of tomatoes gave them both a skill and a bank balance. Programs like this helped widen what country girls could imagine for themselves.
If you visit
Cameron is the seat of Milam County, and the marker makes a good reason to slow down in the courthouse town that tied the county's farms together. As you stand there, picture girls hauling their jars to town to show off a summer's work.
If you're traveling with children, this is a marker that speaks directly to them. The members were their age, and the challenge was simple: grow something, preserve it, and see what it could become. You might ask your kids what they would do with a tenth of an acre. That's roughly a large backyard garden.
The marker also links naturally to the rest of central Texas. Rockdale and Milano, where the girls exhibited, are nearby in the same county, and Waco, home of the Cotton Palace, is within reach for a longer drive. If you pass through in summer, a stop at a farm stand for local tomatoes is a fitting tribute.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Edna Westbrook Trigg
Related events
- · Founding of the Girls' Tomato Clubs
Themes & tags
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Mrs. Edna Westbrook Trigg
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Edna Westbrook Trigg, a Milam County native and schoolteacher, was tapped by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1911 to supervise Texas' first Girls' Tomato Club, teaching rural girls to grow and can their own produce. Her 1912 canning exhibit at the Milano Fair was a state first, and in 1916 she became Texas' first county home demonstration agent. She went on to train other agents at the College of Industrial Arts, now Texas Woman's University.
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