Farm School

By slow, chuffing train from Athens U. S. Minister Lincoln MacVeagh and a quorum of the Greek Cabinet traveled up last week to the northern seaport of Salonika. Base of Allied operations during the War, Salonika was shelled again during the abortive Venizelist revolt last March. This time, however, diplomats and statesmen were going north on a more peaceful mission--to honor one of the most permanent institutions in the Balkans, bearded little old John Henry House of the American Farm School in Salonika.

On his 90th birthday last week Dr. House received nine bound volumes, each containing 90 greetings from friends all over the world. There were special messages from Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York, Nicholas Murray Butler. Theodore Roosevelt, Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, Mrs. Thomas Edison and the presentation to the school of a 90th Birthday Fund totaling nearly $5,000. Made up of hundreds of individual contributions, each was a multiple of 90, from 90-c- to $90. Mrs. B. Adjemovitch, wife of the Yugoslav Consul General at Salonika, went all the way to Belgrade to bring back special wax candles for the birthday cake. Beamed Dr. House: "The whole place seems to me as much like a miracle as possible when we remember what it was when we bought it. I never tire of looking out from our patio or out of our screened porch which looks out directly on the sea. It is all so beautiful, so restful to us old folks!"

The distinguished guests wandered off to inspect the Jersey cows, the Hampshire hogs, the gambusia fish, the flat fat fields, the workshops in which a War-ridden poverty-stricken peasantry is being guided toward economic independence.

John Henry House, Doctor of Divinity, Doctor of Laws, is the oldest living graduate of Western Reserve University, an institution from which he received a diploma in 1868. Three years later he graduated from New York's Union Theological Seminary, married and went out to Bulgaria as a missionary. Except for brief visits to the U. S., he has remained in the Balkans continuously for 63 years.

In 1872, Bulgaria, a Turkish province, was struggling for its independence; on the Turkish island of Crete, Greeks had just ended an unsuccessful three-year revolt and a curly-haired moppet named Eleutherios ("Liberty") Venizelos was just 8 years old. Dr. House learned Bulgarian, and was instrumental in arranging exchanges of Bulgarian and Turkish prisoners at the end of the War.

Traveling about the country, living on goats' cheese and skewered lamb, Dr. House witnessed the complete independence of Serbia, Rumania and Montenegro; saw a Hohenzollern prince proclaimed Rumania's first king; later saw the Duke of Edinburgh's flighty daughter Marie started on her way to becoming that country's most famed queen. The first Balkan War and the Second came and went, followed by the World War, the Greek Revolution and the birth of Albania but Dr. House kept right on teaching school. Once in 1902 he made world headlines by spending nine weeks hunting out the Macedonian bandits that had kidnapped a Miss Ellen M. Stone, missionary, and arranging for her release.

It was not until he had been in the Balkans 30 years that Dr. House decided on exactly the sort of school he wanted to run. At that time he bought 52 acres of desert land near Salonika, put ten little orphans, his first pupils, into a mud-walled cottage and started the first scientific agricultural college in the Balkans. Last week the American Farm School was still the best-known agricultural institution in Greece, with 164 pupils and a homemade swimming pool.

In 1930 the Greek Government, having exempted Dr. House's school from taxation, provided it with 200 $150 scholarships to be used within the following eight years. It is the Farm School's proud boast that even during Depression it has paid at least 70% of all expenses out of the proceeds of its farm. Dr. House's son Charles, who was born & bred in the Balkans, went to Princeton (Class of 1909) and speaks seven languages, is today the active director of the school. Cholera wiped $1,500 worth of prize hogs from the school's books in 1932. But Dr. House is proud of the fact that his school was the first to introduce to Greece the gambusia minnow which devours mosquito larvae. These fish have already nearly wiped malaria from the Salonika plains. Some of the breeder fish came from Rome; others were imported in a goldfish bowl from New Orleans by a messenger who spent long seasick hours cradling the precious aquarium in his arms.

To this day, the American Farm School sells the only pasteurized milk in all Greece, owns the only U. S.-type milk wagon (built by the students) in Hellas.

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