EDUCATORS ’ PERSPECTIVE
J . C . Penney welcomes his Guernsey cow back to the United States in 1935 , after lending her to Admiral Richard Byrd for two years for his second expedition to Antarctica .
DeGolyer Library , SMU his tour of JC Penney stores . His dire financial situation forced him to close Penney Farms and the Agricultural Institute . He slowly recovered from his financial misfortunes with the help of loans from family and friends , which were used to repurchase some of the Penney common stock he had lost . JC Penney CEO Earl Sams also convinced Penney to resume drawing a salary , which he did from 1932 to 1935 . Penney eventually rebuilt his fortune to about $ 20 million and changed his approach to philanthropy from supporting grandiose projects to concentrating on individual farms and the farmers who ran them , as Penney sought to improve the breeding stock of cattle and horses .
Prior to the Great Depression , Penney had already begun a program to improve the Guernsey breed of dairy cattle . This led to the formation of Foremost Dairy , which became a well-known dairy brand . In the 1920s , Penney purchased the farm he grew up on near Hamilton , Missouri . Penney then spent several years improving and expanding the “ Home Place Farm .” In
1937 , he began raising Angus cattle there in partnership with local cattleman Orin James . Penney purchased several farms around Missouri and often partnered with the tenant farmer who lived and worked on the property at the time of Penney ’ s purchase . He raised various breeds of cattle and horses on these farms .
Kruger sums up the importance of Penney ’ s later agricultural endeavors , “ For five decades of the twentieth century , the award-winning livestock Penney acquired and bred made him well known and
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