Short stops: George Washington Carver National Monument

The first national park unit dedicated to a person of color and a non-president lies off a series of innocuous farm roads in southwestern Missouri. 

Before George Washington Carver debarked for the Tuskegee Institute and made his name in science, he grew up as a slave in southwest Missouri. Born in the latter years of the Civil War, the site of the national monument includes the farm where Carver grew up, along with a voluminous museum about his life and accomplishments. 

The monument received approval in 1943, not long after Carver’s death, at a time when new monument designation had been suspended due to World War II. A statue of Carver as a boy sits in the forest, its representation of his youthful longing for knowledge. 

After Emancipation, George continued to live with the Carvers until that thirst led him to move in with a family in town so he could attend the local Black school. George never lived with the Carvers again, although he paid visits over the years. 

 Later he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture from Iowa State Agricultural College (today’s Iowa State University) before taking Booker T. Washington’s offer to lead the nascent agricultural department at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. 

Carver often gets simplified into “the peanut guy,” but he spent his lifetime developing sustainable farming techniques and using peanut and soybean farming to move Southern farmers away from cotton. By the end of his life, he bridged color lines of the day and spoke to students at all-white colleges and advised Thomas Edison and Henry Ford on potential industrial uses for plants. I walked the grounds, even as the winds howled through the trees and inconsequential snow pelted me. 

The cemetery had little connection to Carver. Its burials dated to the 1830s, but mostly involved the white settlers on the property, including Amos Carver, who bought George as a boy. George Washington Carver does not lie there - he was buried in Alabama at the Tuskegee Institute. 

Outside the woods that protects the house and the statue, the wind lashed me at the cemetery, and pellet snow continued until I could return to the forest. The Carver House is strangely peaceful, even as the wind barely rippled Williams Pond. In wintertime, when no one else wanted to walk these trails, I felt a little relaxed for once. 

One sign stood out more than the others. Moses Carver lost George’s mother and George a bandit but a neighbor recovered George from the raiders. Moses traded a $300 racehorse to recover George. Sadly, George’s mother was never seen again. I’m not sure what that says about Amos Carver. I would like it to be positive, even if I suspect he acted for his property. 

That Amos Carver was enlightened enough to allow George to pursue an education was enough, I suppose, since we would have been deprived of a keen mind that made major contributions to agriculture and conservation.