Tracing Bailey's Footsteps: Chicago, 1872

In the spring of 1872, a 14-year-old Liberty Hyde Bailey Jr. stepped off a train along with friends in Chicago and entered a city still rising from the ashes. One year earlier, the Great Fire of 1871 had devasted the city, turning popular neighborhoods to rubble. But when Bailey arrived, he didn't fine despair but determination. The scene was filled with rebuilding, innovation, and the resonating energy of renewal.

The young teenage boy from a small white house in South Haven, Michigan had now had a better understanding of the big, wide world. Chicago meant more to him than just a simple destination - it was a living classroom. Surrounded by the human effort, Bailey began to see how much that both the human and natural world collide. How growth can emerge from ruin.

This very informative visit was one of the few to spark the beautiful mind of Bailey and his lifelong philosophy. Throughout Bailey's entire life, he often spoke and wrote the need for harmony between people and land - more so, between cultivation and care. "We are part of the creation," he stated in The Holy Earth, 1915 "We cannot be content to live only among the things we have made; we must live also among the things that grow."

The current exhibit "The Adventures of Liberty Hyde Bailey: Chicago 1872" invites our visitors to enjoy and explore this pivotal moment in Bailey's life. Through photographs, letters, and historical artifacts, the exhibit traces Bailey's precocious inquisitiveness about plants, his fascination with the natural sciences, and his growing awareness of the world beyond his family's farm. You can sense the world of wonder, and how it would blossom into a lifelong dedication to teaching and discovery. One that eventually shaped agricultural education across America and parts of the world.