A limited window of opportunity has opened to preserve and restore the historic home, gardens, and herbarium complex of Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858-1954) in Ithaca, NY, as the center for a dynamic new effort. Inspired and informed by Bailey’s ecological and polymathic writings and lifework grounded in rural culture, this center would address the environmental crisis of climate change by directly tackling the rural-urban divide that stymies climate progress and that concerned Bailey over a century ago. Bailey liked to describe the work of transcending polarization as “jumping the fence”—breaking loose from the artificial confines that we too often place around ourselves and that keep us from perceiving the whole. We propose to launch our fence-jumping work with a statewide Rural-Urban Dialogue Initiative, for which we have secured partnerships with Cornell Cooperative Extension, the New York State Assembly, and Cornell’s Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment, and we are actively recruiting new partners. But the timeline for saving the properties is narrowing.

Just three years before becoming the founding Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University and eight years before President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him Chair of the Commission on Country Life, Bailey put his naturalist philosophy into the design of the home where he would live to the end of his life, halfway down the hill between the university and downtown Ithaca near the edge of what is now the East Hill Historic District. With architectural plans codesigned by Bailey himself and Cornell architect Clarence A. “Pa” Martin, the spacious, three-story craftsman-style home on Sage Place joined Henry Sage’s carriage house and stable, designed by William Henry Miller, and later a small greenhouse of Bailey’s design.

Recognized as the “Father of Modern Horticulture,” Bailey wrote many of his over seventy influential books (now being republished as a series by Cornell University Press) in this home, at a window overlooking his personal gardens, and it became the headquarters for some of the most influential rural publishing and organizing efforts of the era. Like Bailey’s birth home in Michigan, but with a case carrying greater merit, the Ithaca site ought to be preserved for the public and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The four structures have been remarkably well preserved, first through Bailey’s daughter Ethel’s adult tenure in the home through the 1980s and then over thirty years of a ground lease arranged with the late John Novarr, who maintained its historical integrity while leasing it to Cornell students for housing. It is currently part of the East Hill Historic District, though this only ensures historic protection for the exterior of the buildings.

The ground lease has expired, and Cornell University is renting the two conjoined properties for one final year as student housing. The Cornell Office of Real Estate, sympathetic to our project, is holding it off the market for us at its March 2025 appraisal cost of $1.4M, but not beyond the summer of 2026. A generous donor has pledged $500,000 to the project. We seek to raise $2M more, to complete the property purchase and associated fees and to begin staffing the Liberty Hyde Bailey Center as a nonprofit enterprise. Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County, an independent 501c3 nonprofit, is our fiscal sponsor for this startup phase.

As Savannah Barrett, co-founder of the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange, recently argued in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the currents that shaped the present moment of American political polarization and democratic backsliding have been in motion since philanthropy’s abandonment of rural investment following the 2008 financial crash—yet philanthropy also has a unique opportunity right now to shift that narrative, rebuilding civic bonds and institutional trust. Growing from the fertile foundation of Bailey’s work at the intersections of rural and urban and of ecology and society, the Bailey Center will be the kind of place we need—a human space with local and regional roots, to gather on human terms about shared concerns, and from which to disseminate new models for civic engagement and ecological healing. We need each other. From the resources of the past and a recognition of our shared future, we can build a better day.