On August 21, 1897, The Farmers' Friend and Grange Advocate, a Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, newspaper, carried an advance notice about events at the Interstate Picnic and Exhibition that had been held annually for more than twenty years at Williams Grove on the eastern border of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. On "Suffrage Day" that year, the announcement read,
one of the most eloquent advocates of the cause will speak. The Grange is the only organization that confers upon women equal rights with men , and it is therefore eminently appropriate that the Patrons of Husbandry should give aid and countenance to this movement for the disenthrallment of women.1
The Picnic and Exhibition programs of the 1890s announce numerous activities by and for women. This is in contrast to the first decade and a half of this famous regional Granger gathering. It is the purpose of this paper to focus on the voices of the ladies who stepped to the podium in the last decade of the century. However, if the significance of their appearance is to be comprehended, the forum in which they spoke must be described. What, then, was this Interstate Grangers' Picnic and Exhibition which met annually in the last week of August and the first days of September at Williams Grove?
The first Grange picnic there was held in 1874, one year after the Pennsylvania State Grange was organized at Reading. At the Reading meeting Colonel R. H. Thomas of Mechanicsburg, publisher of The Independent Journal, a Mechanicsburg weekly, represented his local grange. Thomas, an active Mason, with useful political connections, who had participated in writing the constitution of the state Grange, was soon appointed secretary of the state organization; he held that position into the nineties. In July 1874 he began publication of The Farmers' Friend and Grange Advocate as a private printing venture. But by virtue of his office in the State Grange and his weekly's service in publishing news of Grange activities, the paper became, in effect, the house organ of the Noble Order of Patrons of Husbandry in Pennsylvania. By the 1890s it was the oldest grange journal in continuous publication in the nation. In 1874 Thomas also promoted a one-day gathering of members from his own and nearby granges at the popular picnic site at nearby Williams Grove.2 The spot had the advantage of rail service and already had some facilities for handling group outings. The success of the 1874 picnic transformed it into the first of an annual series which would extend until after the 1917 meeting, when exigencies of World War I cause their suspension.
Survival and growth of the Great Grange Picnic were the result of a number of factors, some fortuitous, which operated synergistically. At an early picnic, though presumably not the first, local merchants and manufacturers leased exhibit space to show their wares and sell them at special "Granger" prices to those attending. Soon regional and national manufacturers' agents were on hand to exhibit machines in operation, book orders, and even make deliveries to Grangers and others who came to inspect the latest in equipment. Exhibitor fees for space carried the cost of operations, including an expanded program of an educational, political and cultural nature. Attendance mounted rapidly: 10,000 in 1879, weekly attendance of more than 50,000 by the early 1880s, and daily attendance above 40,000 later in that decade.3 The crowds attracted politicians, speakers on agricultural topics, officers of the National Grange, officials of the United States Department of Agriculture, and proponents of a host of reforms. The picnic was in this aspect a forum for advocacy. There was also polite entertainment in the form of concerts, stereopticon illustrated travel talks, and sing-alongs. More plebian amusements, such as fireworks, Ferris wheels, a conglomeration of side shows, which often outraged moral purists and always charged a fee, added both to the drawing power and durations of patron stays at the Great Picnic. There was something for everyone, and they came not only from Pennsylvania but also from Maryland and West Virginia in significant numbers. By the 1890s the fame of the week had spread nationwide; the term "Interstate" in the name was no pitchman's fantasy. In 1898, for example, persons from 31 states attended the Picnic at the grove.4
On August 1, 1893, Ida G. Kast, of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, an instructor in Irving College in that town, in a letter to the Board of Examiners for Law Students requested permission to appear before the Board for preliminary examination to be registered as a law student. At the bottom of her letter it was noted "that the above Ida G. Kast is a person of good moral character and social standing."