In December 1867, Oliver Hudson Kelley, a former clerk in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and six other men founded the National Grange of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry in Washington.

The Grange, which started in Nebraska in the 1870s as a sort of farmers fraternity and co-op movement, grew explosively, prospered and waned in little more than a decade. After being reborn several ...

In the late 1950s, my brother, several friends and I — all in our teens — were initiated into a grange in order to take advantage of group health insurance rates. Being callow youth and being ...