This thesis documents the beginnings of rural agricultural education as part of the Progressive Era of United States history. As urban growth spurred politicians, educators, and activists to ponder the possibility of a nation-wide, or even global, food crisis, reformers turned to the rural school system to educate a more knowledgeable and modern farming class. Rural resistance to this movement was widespread, as many rural residents saw in it a plan to force them and their children into becoming a permanent farming class. However, there were multiple communities across the Midwest in which early, formal agricultural education took root. In these communities, reformers involved the local community in the design and implementation of agricultural education that was specific to each community's needs. The movement to reform the American Midwestern countryside through its schools offers insight both into the Progressive movement, and into the inner workings of turn-of-the-century rural America.