When it was apparent farmers would need outside help in caring for and harvesting their crops, high school and college students and teachers from West Virginia were recruited the summers of 1943–45. The volunteers joined the “army that doesn’t wear uniforms and carries no weapons.”

When the school term was over, the Extension Service at West Virginia University called the “army” into active duty to save important war crops.

The “soldiers of the soil” came from Beckley, Charleston, Huntington, Grafton, Morgantown, and Parkersburg—from eighteen counties where mining, railroading, chemical, and steel industries were the principal occupations.

More than four hundred young women from West Virginia were placed on farms in the Lake Erie region of northern Ohio and the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland through the Extension Farm Labor Program. The farmers proclaimed the project successful and that the Land Girls had “made a definite contribution to food production during the war years.”

The young women returned home, finished their schooling, married, had children, and many entered the workforce. They tucked the photos and memories away in old trunks, as did their British, Canadian, and Australian sisters.

The Land Girls were not decorated with medals and were almost forgotten, but they once had been described as “a mighty force, marching across Ohio in the food production battle.”

This is a collection of short stories about the WLA movement and personal recollections of a handful of women—“sisters of the soil”—who sowed the seeds of victory during World War II.