News/Publications - Jayson Otto

Public History

Horticulture Not Agronomy: Michigan’s Agroecologists of the Nineteenth Century OR Nature’s Resistance.

Anywhere on the Face of Creation, but Michigan: Colonizing and Developing the GR Fruit Ridge [Talk given at 2025 GRPL History Detectives]

After the Great Panic of 1837, eastern Yankees looked west for land. A year earlier, the Treaty of Washington was negotiated, ceding over a third of Michigan’s land mass from the Odawa and Ojibway people. This talk will focus on an important swath of land northwest of Grand Rapids, now known as the Fruit Ridge, or simply “the Ridge,” which was opened for American colonization following these historical turning points. With the help of some newly discovered letters by Yankee settler Adelia Hills, Jayson Otto will add to the fascinating story of this unique ecological and cultural place in Michigan, a space which went from a contested space of poor squatters, dispossessed indigenous farmers, and eastern Yankees to what is now one of the most productive apple regions in the country.

Her Legacy: Eva McCall Hamilton, Centennial Senator

A Hundred Years Ago, Eva McCall Hamilton became the first woman to sit in the Michigan Senate. It took another hundred years for Grand Rapids to send a woman to the Michigan Senate. Check out this short column on her work. I hope to pursue Hamilton’s work in local civics in the future. Special thanks to Jo Ellyn Clary for here support in getting this out in a timely fashion.

CORRECTION: I stated in this article that Hamilton attended Ferris Institute. After deeper inquiry I realized this may not be correct. The source I based this on was for another woman named Eva Hamilton who was registered for war work in 1917. This information came from a wonderful digital collection of these cards found on the Grand Rapids Public Library website here https://digital.grpl.org/

by Jayson Otto for the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council| Illustrations by Kim Nguyen

https://www.womenslifestyle.com/2021/01/23/343504/womens-lifestyle-january-2021-dr-abha-gupta-varma-caring-for-the-mind-body-soul

Her Legacy: Emily Chamberlin, Municipal Housekeeper, December 2019

Emily Chamberlin was active in starting the farmers markets in Grand Rapids. Here is a short article on her civic work from the November issue of Women’s Lifestyle Magazine.

by Jayson Otto for the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council| Illustrations by Libby VanderPloeg

https://www.womenslifestyle.com/2019/11/05/311489/emily-chamberlin-municipal-housekeeper

Fresh Air, Thrift, Exercise, and Innocent Delight, January 2019

Grand Rapids Public Schools had a robust gardening program in the first two decades of the 20th Century. This talk was given at the Grand Rapids Public Library in 2019 and explores the women and men who made this possible and some of the proposed benefits of gardening for school children. Unfortunately, my Power Point images were corrupted on their way from my office to the library so bear with me…

Academic Publications

Jayson Otto, “Better Flowers and Better Vegetables Easily Leads to the Subject of Better People’: Back Down the Garden Paths with the Municipal Housekeepers of Grand Rapids,” Michigan Historical Review, Volume 51, Number 1, 2025,: 107-143.

Winner of the Graduate Student Essay

Jayson Otto, “Municipal Housekeepers: The Establishment of Gardening Programs and Farmers Markets by Grand Rapids Women’s Clubs in the Early Twentieth Century.” In Cities of Farmers: Problems, Possibilities and Processes of Producing Food in Cities. edited by Alfonso Morales and Julie Dawson, 21-38. 2017 Iowa City, IA, University of Iowa Press.

This chapter is a distillation of my Master’s thesis written while studying ecological food and farming systems in the Community, Agriculture, Recreation, and Resources program at MSU. I plan to expand this work across Michigan and investigate the roles of urban agriculture and public retail farmers markets as public services during the Progressive Era

https://books.google.com/books/about/Cities_of_Farmers.html?id=K3I8DQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Book Reviews

Review of Kathryn Dolan, Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination, 2022, Review of Kathryn Dolan, Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination, Agricultural History 96(4), 2022: 635-637.

Review of Bryan L. McDonald, Food Power: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System, by Jayson Otto, Agricultural History, 93. no. 2, 2019: 381-383.

Review of Amy Trubek, The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir, by Jayson Otto and Stacia Falat, Journal of Rural Social Sciences 25, no. 2, 2010: 186-188.

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1391&context=jrss