The Keystone Connection 4-H Exchange Club has gone full circle.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of 4-H in Pennsylvania, so it's fitting that an Exchange Club member who visited Warren county as a teenager would return 20 years later.
Kevin Elliott is one of three adult chaperones who traveled to Warren County on a 23-hour train ride with six teens from Traill County North Dakota this week.
Article Photos
Horsing around
Members of the 4-H Exchange Club cut up while posing for a portrait, above. Below, Kevin Elliott is seen with Heather Wilcox.
The last time he was here was 1992 and he was hosted by Dianna Sleeman, who's granddaughter is now hosting Elliot's daughter.
"It's kind of neat to see my daughter doing it," Heather Wilcox, Sleeman's daughter said.
The Keystone Connection program is offered 4-H club members ages13 to 18 as a two-year exchange program with 4-H members in other states. Founded with a grant from R. J. Nabisco in 1988, connections allows participants to spend a year staying with another 4-H family in their home state and, in turn, host those they stayed with the alternating year.
Sleeman and Warren County 4-H members then visited North Dakota a year later in 1993.
Next summer Sleeman and Wilcox will travel to Traill County North Dakota, where Elliott said they will visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
Over the past week Sleeman and Wilcox have taken their visitors throughout the county to Upton Brother's farm in Spring Creek, an Amish farm in Lander, the Kinzua Bridge and Rimrock Trail with some swimming and fishing mixed in.
Members of 4-H who are between the ages of 13-18 and are interested in participating in the Keystone Connection 4-H Exchange Club should contact Sleeman at 688-7494 for more information.
4-H started from A. B. Graham's Clark County youth program of 1902, known as the "tomato" or "corn growing" club, and has grown to become the nation's largest youth development organization.
Although Graham's club is recognized as the birth of the 4-H program, the distinctive clover with an "H" on each leaf was the work of Jessie Field Shambaugh in 1910 and the 4-H club name wasn't used until 1912, a century ago this year. The first Pennsylvania program started the same year in Mercer County and it wasn't long before Warren County boasted it's own 4-H program.
Warren County 4-H was officially established in 1920 and today boasts more than 20 different clubs, over 150 distinct projects in over a dozen different fields and includes more than 260 youths in traditional clubs across the county.