|
|
|
Miles of highway blacktop passed before the eyes of John Strother, with more miles yet to pass before he gets to where he’s going.
He’s two days out from his home in Aiken, S.C., headed toward a little place in Southwest Missouri that used to be called Diamond Grove. Used to. In the days when guerilla bands, some owing no allegiance to any country’s flag, roamed like wolf packs over the woods and prairie. When one of those bands stole a little black slave child and his mother from their cabin one dark night to take them Lord-knows-where.
Only the slave child was ever returned.
And it’s for his sake that Strother now drives toward a national monument outside of what is now just simply called Diamond, Mo.
For he was one of about 115 people who wound up attending the Inaugural George Washington Carver Symposium, held Friday and Saturday at the Carver National Monument.
Back home in South Carolina, Strother’s science students at Second Baptist Christian Prep are studying the life and character of the famous black scientist, botanist, inventor, educator and, above all, philanthropist.
It’s mainly for the benefit of those first through fourth graders — most of whom are African-American like himself — that Strother drove two days with little sleep to attend the seminar, which was held “to better understand the life, times, work, and environment of George Washington Carver, and to explore their lessons for today and tomorrow.”
Strother said he’s been trying to stimulate his student’s interest in science, primarily be centering their studies on Dr. Carver, best known for his revolutionary agricultural experiments with the peanut and sweet potato.
Now all his students ever want to do, Strother said, is go on nature walks to study plants and scrutinize things under the class microscope, just like Dr. Carver did.
“His image is so powerful in these kids’ minds that they just want to be like him,” Strother said. “That’s one of the big reasons I wanted to come here.”
The symposium kicked off Friday with a guided tour of the Carver Discovery Center and Carver Nature Trail before all 115 attendees from across the nation packed onto buses to visit Carver-related sites in Diamond and Neosho.
According to Carver Birthplace Association Executive Director Paxton Williams, the group drove by the former Neosho home of Aunt Mariah Watkins, whom Carver lived with when he attended Lincoln School next door. Other stops included Hazelwood Cemetery, north of Neosho, where Aunt Mariah is buried, the Neosho-Newton County Library to see an elderly Dr. Carver depicted on the Neosho Centennial Mural, and the Newton County Historical Park and Museum, where sits an original log cabin from the 1850s, a one-room schoolhouse and, in the museum, an infant’s smock that Aunt Mariah once knitted.
Miles of highway blacktop passed before the eyes of John Strother, with more miles yet to pass before he gets to where he’s going.
He’s two days out from his home in Aiken, S.C., headed toward a little place in Southwest Missouri that used to be called Diamond Grove. Used to. In the days when guerilla bands, some owing no allegiance to any country’s flag, roamed like wolf packs over the woods and prairie. When one of those bands stole a little black slave child and his mother from their cabin one dark night to take them Lord-knows-where.
Only the slave child was ever returned.
And it’s for his sake that Strother now drives toward a national monument outside of what is now just simply called Diamond, Mo.
For he was one of about 115 people who wound up attending the Inaugural George Washington Carver Symposium, held Friday and Saturday at the Carver National Monument.
Back home in South Carolina, Strother’s science students at Second Baptist Christian Prep are studying the life and character of the famous black scientist, botanist, inventor, educator and, above all, philanthropist.
It’s mainly for the benefit of those first through fourth graders — most of whom are African-American like himself — that Strother drove two days with little sleep to attend the seminar, which was held “to better understand the life, times, work, and environment of George Washington Carver, and to explore their lessons for today and tomorrow.”
Strother said he’s been trying to stimulate his student’s interest in science, primarily be centering their studies on Dr. Carver, best known for his revolutionary agricultural experiments with the peanut and sweet potato.
Now all his students ever want to do, Strother said, is go on nature walks to study plants and scrutinize things under the class microscope, just like Dr. Carver did.
“His image is so powerful in these kids’ minds that they just want to be like him,” Strother said. “That’s one of the big reasons I wanted to come here.”
The symposium kicked off Friday with a guided tour of the Carver Discovery Center and Carver Nature Trail before all 115 attendees from across the nation packed onto buses to visit Carver-related sites in Diamond and Neosho.
According to Carver Birthplace Association Executive Director Paxton Williams, the group drove by the former Neosho home of Aunt Mariah Watkins, whom Carver lived with when he attended Lincoln School next door. Other stops included Hazelwood Cemetery, north of Neosho, where Aunt Mariah is buried, the Neosho-Newton County Library to see an elderly Dr. Carver depicted on the Neosho Centennial Mural, and the Newton County Historical Park and Museum, where sits an original log cabin from the 1850s, a one-room schoolhouse and, in the museum, an infant’s smock that Aunt Mariah once knitted.
That night, after diving into a meal taken from, or inspired by, Carver’s own recipes, and which included peanut soup, hashed sweet potatoes, peanuts and mushrooms, sweet potato pie, peanut cake and more, the group heard a talk by Carver expert Peter Burchard.
Burchard has been featured on the History Channel’s Modern Marvels episode about Carver and is author of a special study on the black scientist titled “For His Time and Ours,” which is published by the National Park Service.
Saturday continued with a series of special speakers from Missouri State University, the State Historical Society of Missouri, Missouri University, Iowa State University, Tuskegee University, Harvard University, North Carolina State University and the Ozarks Afro-American Heritage Museum.
“We’re talking about who Carver was, what he did, and how there are lessons to be gleaned from the man and his work,” Williams said.
Besides just Carver-aficionados, many of the seminar attendees were college students, including some from institutions related to Carver’s life, such as Iowa State, where he attended, and Tuskegee University, where he later taught.
Meanwhile Strother said he enjoyed the tours, but was “really very impressed” with the 18,000-square-foot Discovery Center, his favorite features of which being the mock schoolroom and the real-life laboratory that was modeled after Carver’s own.
And he added that the next time he visits, he’s bringing his students with him.
“I want them to explore and go through the same tours that we’re going through (during the symposium),” Strother said. “I really want them to just get a feel of the places that Carver walked and help them understand the distances he had to walk in order to get an education.”
For now, when he goes back home, he’s bringing with him a book on Carver for each of his students. It’s important for them to have someone like Dr. Carver to look up to, Strother noted.
“As a young person, he was just very exploratory,” he said. “But whatever it took he was simply going to get an education. And that’s one thing we’ve admired about him. That, and he was also very truly a renaissance man. People are still benefiting from all of his discoveries.”
•••
The symposium was sponsored by the George Washington Carver Birthplace Association, National Park Service, African American Experience Fund, Missouri Humanities Council, National Park Foundation, Missouri State University, Crowder College, Simpson College, Iowa State University-College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Iowa Public Television.
