FFApresident.com

Leslie Applegate: National FFA President 1928–29

New Jersey · No. 1 of 100 · National FFA President 1928–29

By FFApresident.com Editorial

At a Glance

Every FFA member learns one name before almost any other: Leslie Applegate. He was the first person elected to lead the Future Farmers of America nationally, and he was still a teenager when it happened. Beyond the single line he gets in the FFA Manual, though, his story is the story of a New Jersey fruit grower who stayed on the land, joined the organizations that served it and kept building a farm business for decades.

Road to National Office

The Applegate farm story starts in 1908, when Charles and Carrie Applegate bought 130 acres near Freehold, New Jersey. Apples were already being grown on nearby farms, so Charles began growing apples too. Leslie grew up on that farm and attended Freehold High School, where he took agriculture classes. Those classes, taught under the vocational agriculture programs created by the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, were the pipeline that fed the new national organization.

New Jersey had its own roots in the movement. The state agricultural education office records that the New Jersey FFA association received its charter on November 20, 1928, the day the national organization was founded, which made it the third chartered state. Applegate was not only a New Jersey delegate’s choice; he was the state’s young face at a convention that would shape the next century of agricultural education.

The National Presidency

On November 20, 1928, 33 delegates from 18 states gathered at the Baltimore Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, during the American Royal livestock show, and founded the Future Farmers of America. They adopted a constitution and bylaws, set national dues at 10 cents a year and elected Applegate of Freehold as the first national president. The convention also adopted a national emblem modeled on the symbol of the earlier Future Farmers of Virginia, the state organization that served as the pattern for the national group.

When he was elected, Applegate was 17 years old, a junior in high school and a member of the school football team, according to a March 1929 newspaper account reproduced by NC State University’s agricultural-education history blog. He held an office with no precedent. There was no earlier president to call, no tradition of an officer team and no national blue corduroy jacket yet; the jacket was adopted as official dress in 1933. His year was spent setting the tone for what a national officer should be.

The organization he led grew quickly. A Kansas City Star article from April 1929, preserved in the FFA archives at IUPUI, documents the rapid growth of the young organization, and the second national convention in November 1929 brought delegates from far more states than the first. By the time Applegate’s successor, Wade Turner of North Carolina, took office, FFA was well on its way to becoming a national institution.

Life After FFA

Applegate went on to a career in New Jersey agriculture rather than in national politics or corporate life. According to NC State’s profile of him, he was active in his local Grange and in the New Jersey State Horticultural Society, where he served on the state Executive Committee. He also served on the Board of Directors of the New Jersey Cooperative Fruit Marketing Association, one of the marketing groups that helped growers sell their crops.

His own orchard operation grew with him. By 1953 he had eight full-time workers and hired as many as 50 additional workers at the peak of harvest. He was one of the first growers in New Jersey to adopt the box-pack of wrapped apples, a packing method meant to deliver fruit to market in better condition. In other words, the first national FFA president built exactly the kind of career the organization was created to encourage: he farmed, he marketed, he led his industry’s associations and he kept improving how his farm worked.

Legacy

Applegate’s legacy is partly the simple fact of being first. Every national president since, from Wade Turner in 1929 to Josie Jennings in 2026, holds an office he filled before anyone knew what it would become. The NC State history blog, which traced his life through newspapers and family records, closes by saying he is “more than one sentence in the FFA Manual.” The rest of this site’s biographies try to do the same for the 99 presidents who followed him.

Next: Wade Turner, 1929–30 →

Sources

Wade Turner →

← Back to the Complete List of National FFA Presidents