Robinson Station Celebration

Aweek after the West Kentucky Experiment Substation at Princeton was dedicated on Labor Day 1925, another Experiment station for Kentucky was dedicated 300 miles east, at the tiny hamlet of Quicksand.

This time, the tract of land donated for a substation was considerably larger — 15,000 acres, or about 23.5 square miles, of logged-over forest in Breathitt, Knott, and Perry Counties.

E.O. Robinson, a self-made millionaire from northern Kentucky, had donated land that his and F.W. Mowbray’s lumber company had clear-cut from about 1912 to 1922 to the College of Agriculture to establish a forest and substation to “make the mountain section a more profitable as well as a more comfortable place in which to live and work, and to fit its people to live and do that work.”

An additional ten-acre plot in Quicksand was donated by Miles Back to be the headquarters of the station. Back had owned the original 15,000 acres of timber before selling them to Robinson and Mowbray.

While reports of the dedication at Quicksand are sketchy at best, we do know that College of Agriculture Dean T.P. Cooper and other dignitaries from Lexington sojourned by Pullman train from Lexington on the morning of September 11, 1925 for the dedication that afternoon.

By the following year, things were in full speed with a field day held in late September. The two-day event, called the Robinson Harvest Festival, featured ballad singing, hog and chicken calling and fiddling contests, as well as displays of fruits and vegetables, home handicrafts and farm products, a mule show and a healthy baby contest.

A strong dedication to Robinson’s specified purpose, coupled with the strong sense of community that developed quickly, led the substation to set up a unique deal. The deal was that any farm family in eastern Kentucky could bring in a bushel of ordinary seed corn and replace it with a bushel of improved seed; they could trade in a common rooster for a purebred rooster. They also could trade in a poor quality boar for a better one to improve their herd.

According to Nevyle Shackelford’s Robinson Substation: A Short History, “from out of the hills, hollows, creek and river bottoms, people came on foot, on horseback, in sleds, oxcarts and two-horse wagons, bringing their razorback hogs, worn out roosters and stunted seeds to swap for better strains that were being made available to the farmers of the mountains.”

During its three-quarters of a century of existence, the Robinson Substation has kept its promise to effect the reason for its existence. While the faculty and staff at the substation no longer take in old roosters, poor boars, or bad corn seed for trade, they do offer a complete panoply of research and educational services for the people of eastern Kentucky.

The tradition of a harvest festival continued every year until 1949. A field day is now held every other year, alternating with the Research and Education Center at Princeton.

This year’s field day, celebrating Robinson Station’s 75 years of progress, will be held July 19 at the station in Quicksand. Visitors can expect tours conducted by faculty members about field and horticultural crops and forestry research.