Green 'N' Growing - The History of Home Demonstration and 4-H Youth Development on North Carolina

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• Learn more about 4-H clubs, domestic life, farming, history, home demonstrations, and North Carolina.

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North Carolina was one of the first states to have 4-H and Home Demonstration programs. 4-H began as a boy’s program in 1909 and Home Demonstration for girls began in 1911. Today the two programs are combined and have over 208,000 participants. Over the years, North Carolina State University has collected photographs, articles, brochures, pamphlets, and other primary source materials on the programs. The D.H. Hill Library Special Collections Research Center has digitized these documents and published them on the Green ‘N’ Growing website.

Here you will find over 3500 photographs, most of which document 4-H in North Carolina. Around 400 of them show participants in the home demonstration program. The photographs can be browsed by county. The vast majority of materials relating to the programs are textual in nature. There are 17,000 pages of text of which only 10% will be digitized. These include pamphlets on canning, gardening, and sewing, annual reports on the programs which begin in 1915, and the “Clover Leaf” kids’ newsletter. “Tomato Club” booklets which were decorated, illustrated and written by the girls in the Home Demonstration program will be available to read. Visitors to the site will even find instructions on how to wire a home and use electrical appliances. All of these documents are in PDF format and are fully text searchable.

The project covers the years from inception to 1975. Prior to 1969, black and white students were in segregated programs. The African American and American Indian programs are also documented on the site.

Visitors to the site can search the database or browse by subject. There is also a historical timeline of the programs. When viewing the photographs, make sure that your computer’s pop-up blocker is turned off. When clicking on a specific topic, the available photographs will open on another page. By clicking on the image you want to view, you will get an enlargement of the photograph and you can zoom in to see details within it. Click on the thumbnail of the photograph and then the data link. A description of the photograph, date it was taken, cataloging information and more will be shown.