From Muckraker to Garden Maker: Ida Tarbell at Twin Oaks

November 5, 1857 

On this day, Ida Tarbell was born - a woman who would become known for exposing Standard Oil's monopolistic practices but who found her greatest peace tending to her beloved Connecticut farm.

She named it Twin Oaks, and it became not just her home but a sanctuary where the hard-hitting journalist could tend to gentler pursuits.

While history remembers her as America's first investigative journalist, the garden would know her as something else entirely - a devoted steward of the soil who once wrote,

When the first seed catalogue comes in the spring, I give myself up to an orgy of picking and choosing... Seeds are the most profitable investment I know about.

Why a 5-cent package of lettuce seeds brings in about a 20,000 percent return on the money invested.

In 1906, after years of hard-hitting journalism, Tarbell purchased a 40-acre abandoned farm in Easton, Connecticut.

She recalled the moment fondly:

I wanted something of my own. And at last, by a series of circumstances, purely fortuitous, I acquired forty acres and a little old house in Connecticut.

I had meant to let the land and the house run to seed if they wanted to. I had no stomach, or money, for a “place.” I wanted something of my very own with no cares. Idle dream in a world busy in adding artificial cares to the load Nature lays on our shoulders.

The land called to her in ways that her previous life never had:

"Fields calling to be rid of underbrush and weeds and turned to their proper work; a garden spot calling for a chance to show what it could do; apple trees begging to be trimmed and sprayed. I had bought an abandoned farm, and it cried loud to go about its business."

This woman who had taken on Standard Oil and earned the title "muckraker" from President Theodore Roosevelt found herself surrendering to the gentle demands of her garden, writing,

Why should I not answer the cry? Why should I not be a farmer? Before I knew it, I was at least going through the motions, having fields plowed, putting in crops, planting an orchard, supporting horses, a cow, a pig, a poultry yard – giving up a new evening gown to buy fertilizer!

Her enthusiasm for growing things became infectious. By 1915, she was telling Country Life in America magazine: "When the first seed catalogue comes in the spring, I give myself up to an orgy of picking and choosing... Seeds are the most profitable investment I know about. Why a 5-cent package of lettuce seeds brings in about a 20,000 percent return on the money invested."

In time, Twin Oaks quickly became more than just a farm—it became the heart of Tarbell's family life.

Looking back at her life after a decade and a half of living at Twin Oaks, she recalled,

Here I was sixty-three with only a small accumulation of material goods. I must work to live and satisfy my obligations. To be sure I had my little home in Connecticut which in the fifteen years since I had acquired it had not only grown increasingly dear to me; it had also taken on an importance which I had not foreseen. It had become the family home.

Here my mother had come to pass the last summers before her death in 1917; here my niece Esther had been married under the Oaks; here my niece Clara and her husband Tristram Tupper, battered by war service, had come in 1919 to live in our little guest house. Here Tris had written his first successful magazine story. Here their two children passed their first years. Near by, my sister had built herself a studio to become her home.

A hundred associations gave the place a meaning and dignity which I had never expected to feel in any home of my own, something that only comes when a place has been hallowed by the joys and sorrows of family life.

Tarbell's garden flourished alongside her writing career. From her first-floor office at Twin Oaks, she continued her work while tending to her Jersey cow Esther Ann, her mare Minerva (named after her own middle name), and even a pig named "Juicy."

Tarbell even hosted legendary autumn feasts where sixty of her friends and neighbors gathered to enjoy the bounty of her land - roasted pig, potatoes, squash, and pies made from apples grown on her land.

After helping Dr. J. P. Mahaffy of the University of Dublin with an article entitled Gossip About Greece, the two struck up an acquaintance. In Tarbell's autobiography, she wrote,

[Our] acquaintance grew out of our mutual interest in the flora of any spot where we happened to be.

One day as I came in from a botanizing expedition outside the grounds carrying stocks of the lovely field lilies common in the region, Dr. Mahaffy seized my arm:

"You care for flowers and plants? I thought American women had no interest in them."

A libel I quickly hooted.

In defense of my sisterhood I went diligently to work to show him our summer flora. But he cared for nothing as much as our summer lilies, and begged me after the flowering was over to send him bulbs, which I proudly did.

In exchange I received from his Dublin garden seeds of a white poppy which, he wrote me, he had originally gathered in the shadow of the statue of Memnon in Egypt. Those poppies have always gone with me; they flourished in my mother's garden in Titusville-now they flourish in my Connecticut garden.

Today, Twin Oaks stands as a National Historic Landmark, a testament to a remarkable woman who found that the greatest stories sometimes grow right in our own backyards.

Ultimately, it was poetic that the woman who had exposed the mightiest corporation of her time discovered that the simple acts of tending a garden and nurturing the land could bring rewards that no investigation could uncover.