Hazen Pingree's Potato Patches

In the winter of eighteen ninety-three, Hazen Pingree was well into his time as mayor of Detroit and the city was in the grip of an economic depression. Unemployment was severe. Families who had been factory jobs found themselves without income and without the ability to buy food at the prices the market was charging. The charitable institutions of the city were overwhelmed.

Pingree had a practical turn of mind. He surveyed the city and identified vacant lots, parcels of land that were sitting unused because their owners had no immediate use for them. He negotiated with those owners to allow the lots to be broken into garden plots. He distributed seeds and basic tools through city channels. He persuaded his friends in the business community to donate money for the initial supplies. And he organized the unemployed families of Detroit to plant, tend, and harvest vegetables on those lots.

The program fed an estimated three thousand families in its first year. It became known as Pingree's Potato Patches, a name that contained a gentle mockery the mayor accepted without apparent discomfort. The idea spread to other cities. National newspapers covered it. Pingree's approach, using government authority and vacant land to address hunger during economic downturns, became a model that reformers cited for a generation.

Pingree was elected governor of Michigan in eighteen ninety-six, while still serving as mayor, a dual office he held only briefly before the courts required him to choose. He is one of the most effective reform politicians in Michigan history, and one of the less remembered. A bronze statue of him stands in Grand Circus Park. He is wearing a frock coat and looking toward the city he fed during a depression.