DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say — and friend, this one's a story worth pulling over for. Picture East Texas, 1906. Crop production is low, the farm economy is about as flat as a drought-cracked field, and something has to give.
Smith County is about to give it. On November 12th of that year, a meeting was called in an opera house — right near the very spot this marker stands. Now, an opera house might seem a funny place to change the future of American agriculture, but that's exactly what happened inside those walls.
Forty-four local leaders crowded in, many of them members of the Tyler Commercial Club, an outfit with enough civic ambition to want to underwrite farm improvement from the ground up. Joining them were County Judge S. A.
Lindsey and a man who'd come a long way with big ideas — Dr. Seaman A. Knapp of the United States Department of Agriculture.
Three years before that meeting, the first cooperative farm demonstration program had already been tested on the Walter C. Porter property over in Kaufman County. That program showed that scientific farming operations could actually work — that the methods held up when you put them in the dirt.
Now Smith County was ready to take the next step, and they knew the man for the job. That day, the county appointed Wm. C.
Stallings — a farmer out of the Dixie community, west of Tyler — as the first county agent in Texas. Not just the first in Texas. The first in the entire nation to serve only one county.
Stallings was born in 1842 and would live until 1916, and what he stepped into that November was something nobody had a blueprint for, because he was the blueprint. Those two things together — the demonstration program on the Porter property and the appointment of Stallings — those were the first steps toward what grew into the County Agricultural Agents' system. You know it today as the Cooperative Extension Service, known the world over, reaching into rural communities and urban areas alike, furthering agricultural and human resources through education.
All of it traces a line back to one room, forty-four men, and a November day in Smith County when somebody decided things had to change — and then went ahead and changed them.
What the marker says
At a time of low crop production and depressed farm economy, Smith County became the birthplace of the County Agricultural Agent concept. This occurred in an historic meeting Nov. 12, 1906, in an opera house near this site. Present were Dr. Seaman A. Knapp of the United States Department of Agriculture, County Judge S. A. Lindsey, and some 44 local leaders-- many belonging to the Tyler Commercial Club which sought to underwrite farm improvement. Smith County that day appointed Wm. C. Stallings (1842-1916) the first county agent in Texas and the first in the nation to serve only one county. Three years earlier the first cooperative farm demonstration program was begun on the Walter C. Porter property, Kaufman County. That successful application of scientific farming operations and appointment of Stallings (an outstanding farmer of the Dixie community, west of Tyler) were first steps toward establishment of the County Agricultural Agents' system, now known the world over as the Cooperative Extension Service. Today its educational programs further development of agricultural and human resources in both rural and urban areas.