My research for an exhibition this coming February has led me to a pamphlet, Small Farms in “The Great Winter Garden” published in or about 1915 by the Carolina Trucking Development Company, owed by Hugh MacRae, in Wilmington. The pamphlet’s purpose is to describe and offer for sale farms and homes owned by the company—with illustrations, facts, and statistics aplenty—as part of its larger effort to create agricultural colonies in the area. What interests me at this stage of my digging is the slogan, “The Great Winter Garden,” created by the Bureau of Soils of the United States Department of Agriculture.
A map inside the pamphlet illustrates its geographic range along the mid and southern Atlantic coast; I am trying to determine the date of its origin, and how widely the slogan may have been adopted. Initial explorations are yielding minimal leads. I’ve only located one thus far: an article entitled, “Truck Soils of the Atlantic Coast Region” by Jay A. Bonsteel in the Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture for 1912, which includes the same map used in the pamphlet. Do you know of other items or references to The Great Winter Garden?