A Fitting Honor for Pioneering Scientist

Born to a slave two weeks before the end of the Civil War, George Washington Carver rose to stunning heights as a scientist, educator and humanitarian.

The Diamond Grove plantation, where the man who would revolutionize American agriculture spent his boyhood, is now the George Washington Carver National Monument, administered by the National Park Service. It’s the first monument of its kind dedicated to an African American.

The park sweeps across 210 acres of rural southwestern Missouri. Its prairie grassland, dotted with shaded woods and shallow streams, is a gentle oasis of singing birds, wildflowers and butterflies where young Carver’s fascination with plants developed.

“Just being on the farm and spending 10 to 12 years wandering through the woods, we believe this environment influenced him to become what he did later in life,” park ranger Lana Henry said.

The park’s visitor center features films about Carver’s life; a museum displays exhibits of his scientific research, his artwork and other artifacts.

A three-quarter-mile hiking path winds through the park, with interpretive stops showing where Carver was born, Moses and Susan Carver’s plantation house, the Carver family cemetery and a bronze statue of the scientist as a boy.

The monument was created under an Act of Congress in 1943, shortly after Carver’s death; then-Sen. Harry Truman of Missouri was a sponsor of the legislation.

Carver gained worldwide fame for developing more than 300 industrial uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes. He also rescued the South’s economy by persuading cotton farmers to rotate crops and use natural fertilizers to restore worn-out soil.

Born in a one-room log shanty, Carver was kidnaped by bushwhackers as an infant, along with his mother. He later was found in Arkansas and returned to the Carver farm, but his mother never was found.

He was raised as one of the Carvers’ own children and took their last name. As a child, he spent hours in the woods studying plants, soils and insects.

Around age 12, he went off to the only school for black children in the area, eight miles away. Then for the next 20 years, he worked odd jobs to finance his education.

In 1896, Carver started an agriculture department at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he saw a chance to achieve a goal he established early in his life, “to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of ‘my people.’ ”

Besides his scientific breakthroughs with peanuts and sweet potatoes, Carver worked with Henry Ford to perfect a process to extract rubber from the milk of goldenrod; created paving blocks from cotton and rubber from sludge, and developed new strains of cotton.

“I think what impresses me most about Carver is his spirit,” Ford said. “He taught himself how to read and became a very good artist and musician. He didn’t have a school to go to and yet had the thirst for knowledge to walk eight miles to find a school that would take black children.

“He just had quite a determination.”