Leonidas Lafayette Polk

Leonidas Lafayette Polk was on a threshold, before him the chance to become one of the most celebrated Tar Heels of all time, when he died unexpectedly. Even so, he deserves a special place in history as founder of the Progressive Farmer, which became the most successful periodical of its kind, and he was a leader of one of the most arresting reform movements in American experience. Polk, who was a distant kinsman of President James Knox Polk and namesake of Gen. Leonidas Polk of Civil War celebrity, was born in Anson County in 1837. His formal education was limited to 10 months at Davidson College and he was a Piedmont farmer when he won election to the General Assembly on the eve of the Civil War. He was appointed militia colonel and was wounded at Gettysburg in 1863 before making a successful absentee campaign for re-election to the legislature the next year.

Polk's economic prospects were severely eroded by the war and he spent eight years of the Reconstruction period building his fortunes once more.It was in this period that he was elected vice-president of the Anson County Agricultural Club, a position that would help shape his destiny thereafter. When a railroad was laid out across lands he owned, he initiated the creation of a town there called Polkton and established his own newspaper, the Ansonian. As an editor, Polk became active in the North Carolina Press Association and toured the state in that capacity, an experience that introduced him to the fundamental problems of farmers throughout the state.

Polk afterward devoted much of his life to securing the benefits of education for North Carolina farmers. He also took the lead in legislation that created the state Department of Agriculture, Immigration and Statistics in 1877, of which he was named first commissioner. As Commissioner of Agriculture, Polk worked energetically in behalf of his fellow farmers. He had a chemist test fertilizers being sold in the state and drove out the unscrupulous operators in the business. He promoted laws to require the fencing of livestock rather than crops, as had been the practice since early colonial times. Also, Polk established the State Museum (Subsequently known as the Museum of Natural History) and pushed hard to attract immigrant laborers to the state as a solution to its labor problems. Under Polk’s tutelage, the agricultural department was a model widely imitated in its practices by other states.

But political opposition led to his resignation in 1880 and for a time he headed a farm implement company, became secretary of the state Agricultural Society, and worked for one year as editor of the Raleigh News and Observer. It was this background in journalism and agricultural improvement that led Polk in 1885 to found the Progressive Farmer as a vehicle for his crusades. By 1889 it had the largest ciculation of any publication in the state and was widely read outside the state.

Polk shared the belief of many farmers in the 1880s that they could expect no meaningful relief of their economic woes from either the Democrats or the Republicans. In 1887 he became a prime mover in the organization of a national body known as the Farmers Alliance, and was elected as its president. So successful was the Alliance in generating and harnessing support, that it went political in 1889 and began planning a third political party. Through the Farmers Alliance and the Progressive Farmer, Polk drew 300 farmers to Raleigh to lobby for various solutions to their problems.

An earlier effort to get state backing for an agricultural and mechanical college (now N.C. State University) had led to the opening of that institution in 1889. But the 1891 General Assembly, dominated by Alliance candidates and their sympathizers, became known as the Farmers' Legislature. It enacted funds for a State Normal and Industrial School for white girls (now UNC-Greensboro), an Agricultural and Mechanical College for the Colored Race (now N.C. A&T University), increased public school taxes, and provided better regulation of railroads. The session portended a revolution in the role of the state government in public affairs. The new Peoples Party planned its initial national convention for Omaha in 1892 with Leonidas Polk almost universally conceded to become its presidential nominee. It was at this supreme moment of the culmination of his work and dreams that Polk died in June after a brief illness. For the Peoples Party and its associated Populist Movement, Polk's death was the first of a long succession of blows that would weaken and finally, destroy its momentum for reform. In addition to his many other public services, Polk had been instrumental in persuading the North Carolina Baptists to realize Thomas Meridith's dream of a senior college for women, which opened in Raleigh in 1899. His untimely loss leaves history with one of its intriguing might-have-beens for the contemplation of later generations.