Our own Kansas Botanist and Inventor

In my search for scientists working during the late 1800s, when Isaac Werner lived in Kansas and participated in the Populist Movement, I noticed a Kansan who deserves to be mentioned for his personal, as well as his professional achievements.  George Washington Carver was a botanist and an inventor, but perhaps as important as his professional achievements are the nearly impossible personal obstacles he overcame.

This stone marks the NE corner of the homestead Carver filed in 1886

Yes, he was the first black student to study at Iowa State Agricultural College in Ames, and after receiving his master's degree there, he became the first black faculty member (1891-1896).  In 1896 he was invited to head the Agricultural Department at Tuskegee Institute, where he remained for 47 years.  The focus of his adult life was returning Southern soils depleted by years of growing cotton to land capable of renewed production.  In addition to restoring the land, he sought to improve the lives of the poor farmers trying to eke out a living on the exhausted soil.  He taught them about raising crops like sweet potatoes, peanuts, soybeans, and cowpeas to restore nitrogen to the soil while also providing healthful food for their diets.  These are the achievements for which most people know him.

Credit: Frances Benjamin Johnston

However, his first college endeavors were at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa in 1890, where he pursued art and piano.  It was his art teacher who suggested that he use his gift for painting flowers and plants in the study of botany.  For the remainder of his life he continued painting, and one of his paintings, depicting yucca and cactus plants, was shown at the World's Columbian Exposition, better known as the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.  A fire in 1947 at the museum where his paintings were displayed destroyed all but three of them, the yucca and cactus painting being one of the three saved.

Achieving academic respect and international fame was quite remarkable for a black man of his time, yet that is what he did.  He met with three American presidents--Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and FDR.  Carver became friends with the son of one of the  professors with whom he had studied, and that professor, Henry Cantwell Wallace, served as Secretary of Agriculture from 1921 to 1924, as had Carver's former dean and professor, James Wilson, from 1897 to 1913.  However, it was his young friend and the son of Professor Wallace, Henry A. Wallace, who served as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from 1933 to 1940, then became Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vice president from 1941 to 1945.  Obviously, George Washington Carver had friends in high places.

W. W. II Poster, circa 1943

All of those achievements are things you may have learned at some point in school, and they are surely why his name was included among the other scientists of the late 1800s and early 1900s on the references I consulted.  But for me the most amazing things he did happened earlier, for the beginning of his life offered no clues of the achievements to come.

He was born into slavery some time in the early 1860s and was owned by Moses Carver, a German American immigrant.  His parents, whose names were Mary and Giles, were purchased in 1855 for $700, and baby George, joined an older sister and brother.  A few days after his birth, night raiders from Arkansas kidnapped his mother, his sister, and him.  Although Moses Carver sought their return, only George was found, and it is said that a horse was traded for the infant's return.  Moses and his wife Susan raised George and his older brother James as their own, with Susan teaching them the basics of reading and writing.

1948 US Postage Stamp

Black children in Diamond, Missouri where the Carver's lived, were not allowed to go to public school, and George's pilgrimage for additional education began at a school for black children 10 miles away.  When he rented a room from a woman named Mariah Watkins, he introduced himself as "Carver's George," as a slave would have done using his master's name showing ownership, but she corrected him, saying that he should use the name George Carver.

His next destination at the age of 13 was Fort Scott, Kansas to attend an academy there.  After seeing a black man killed by white men, he left Fort Scott for a series of schools, but eventually he earned his diploma from Minneapolis High School in Kansas.  Eager for college, he was accepted at Highland University in Kansas, but they revoked his acceptance when he arrived because of his race.  Deferring college, he claimed a homestead in Ness County, Kansas, in 1886, where he built a sod house with a small conservatory for plants and flowers.  He raised corn, garden produce, cotton, shrubbery and trees, including fruit trees.  To earn cash, he did odd jobs in town and worked as a ranch hand.  In early 1888, he borrowed $300 from the Bank of Ness City in order to resume his education. 

This summary brings us back to the part of his story with which I began this blog, the part which most people have heard before.  However, it is his birth and his youth that I find so amazing--how he somehow survived a kidnapping when he was so young, how he was fortunate to be owned by a couple willing to rescue and raise him, and how he struck out on his own, determined to get an education.

US Farm Security Adm. 1942

Isaac Werner resumed writing in his journal in 1884, having come to Kansas about 1878.  From the summary of Carver's years in Kansas, it would seem that George Washington Carver may have arrived a bit ahead of Isaac, but he left Kansas around the summer of 1888 or slightly later.  The testing of different crops and seed varities Isaac described in his journal may have been similar to George Carver's plant experiments  in Ness County, although that tall grass prairie is north and west of Stafford County where Isaac staked his claim, and the soils and weather would have been different.  Both men certainly had in common a desire to study what crops would do well in Kansas, and they would both have approached their farming efforts in a similar, more scientific way.

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Ks Historical Marker on Hwy K-96 just west of Beeler, KS