Carver Homestead Monument
Carver Homestead Monument
Location: 1 mile south of Beeler.
Nearest Towns: Beeler, Ness City, Dighton
Fee: None
Photos Copyright Harland J. Schuster. Please do not use without permission.
A
simple stone marker and bronze plaque mark a significant, but
little known place of Kansas history. It was here that George Washington
Carver, who would one day go on to be one of America's great inventors and
scientists, homesteaded a quarter-section of Ness County soil.
The year was 1880, and Kansas was widely known as a land of opportunity. This opportunity extended even to African Americans, who found that ironically after being given freedom during the Civil War, were faced with an increasingly strict system of racial segregation. This was the case not only in the post war South, but in the North as well. On the frontier, however, things were different. Any man--regardless of color--could, for a nominal fee, homestead a quarter-section of land (160 acres or a square parcel of land measuring 1/4 mile on all sides). No other nation on earth had before or has since given out land to the public in this manner. In so doing, they formed a nation of land owners instead of developing a Feudal system, so common in Europe, where only a few owned the majority of the land, and thus controlled the wealth of those nations.
Unfortunately, the climate of Kansas is
unforgiving. For the most part, the weather consists of long periods
of drought followed by periods of flooding rains. The quarter sections of
land, which were adequate in the eastern states, often could not produce enough
to sustain a family in Western Kansas. Perhaps it was because of
this--or possibly Carver sensed that something much greater lay in his
future--that he left this area. At any rate, he eventually abandoned his
homestead here on the west Kansas prairie to pursue a college
education--something almost unheard of for Negroes at that time. The story
goes that he walked all the way to Highland, in extreme Northeast Kansas, only
to be denied admission because he was Black. Undaunted, he eventually
found acceptance at a college in Iowa, and graduated with a Master's Degree of
Agriculture in 1896.
Carver would go on to become a member of the faculty at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, were he spent more than 40 years teaching and inventing. He is generally credited with inventing peanut butter. But his uses for this southern crop didn't end there. Processes for making paint, soap, cosmetics, and more than 500 products from peanuts and sweet potatoes were developed.