Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Garden - Dolores Jordan Briggs, Garden Chair
The Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Garden community garden located at the corner of Mt. Olive Road and Tayner Street. (directly across the street from the main entrance to the school.) The lot dimensions are 120 feet X 40 feet. The completed project will consist of fifteen raised organic brick beds on the west end, a flower garden around an already existing walnut tree in the center of the lot, an outdoor classroom on the east end and a composting area in the southeast corner. The beds will be five feet wide (exterior dimension) and 18 inches tall with at least two beds of greater dimensions to accommodate our wheelchair and special needs students. The garden will serve as a model to be eventually repeated throughout the community in many of the vacant lots. The produce will be shared with the community and the students involved in the project. This project is the first in a series of inter-generational projects involving gardening, canning and preserving, and quilting.
School & Garden History by Mrs. Dolores Briggs
The garden has been designated as the ELEANOR ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL GARDEN commemorating the visit to our campus by our former first lady on November 20, 1937. During the Great Depression all county schools were encouraged to participate in gardening and students and families received free seeds. The Memphis World reported: “The Douglass school, a Negro industrial center, has in and around its territory a total of 682 gardens.” For a community of about 800 families, that was a phenomenal ratio. ”The school children used nearby vacant land to plant gardens and real estate developers cooperated by allowing families to plant gardens in empty lots. The foodstuffs grown were canned and used to provide hot lunches for school children through the coming year. Also, residents could use the canning equipment to preserve their own vegetables for their families. In return, the user gave the school one out of every six cans.” It was during this time that Douglass School and its community achieved national prominence. Mrs. Roosevelt came to make a first-hand visit to observe the Live-at-Home total program. She was so impressed with what the community exhibited that she took the project back to the nation’s capital and wrote several articles in leading newspapers and magazines pertaining to the Live-at-Home project. While preserving and restoring community history and pride, not only will our garden project provide food and possibly a leisure pursuit for members of the community, but also, it will address the problem of many of the vacant lots in the community which have become an eyesore. Ultimately, we want to tie our gardens into Mrs. Roosevelt’s Victory Gardens of 1943 and the Victory gardens being promoted by our present first lady Michelle Obama, hoping that we can invite her to observe our efforts in much the same way as Mrs. Roosevelt did our fore parents back in the 30’s.
Garden Club Attends Memphis City Beautiful Commission Meeting
