Author: Henry Walter Gilbertson

Henry Walter Gilbertson began work in Sussex County on 16 March 1912 as the first county agricultural agent appointed in New Jersey. Having no motor car, he covered some 6,000 miles on horseback that first year to reach 700 farms, taught in kitchens, churches and grange halls, and called at forty local schools on the reasoning that children would carry new methods home to their parents. With his wife Maud he started the county's earliest 4-H clubs. The couple left at the start of 1915, when he moved to the Washington area to supervise extension work in the western states, and he stayed an administrator in the Department of Agriculture for decades. County-Agent Standards and The Purpose of Reports and Methods of Reporting belong to that later desk work: what an agent was expected to achieve, and how results were to be written up and credited.