Homestead of a Genius
Kansas
On this quarter section of Kansas prairie, a young man tried to make a living from the land. His name was George Washington Carver. Born into slavery in Missouri around eighteen sixty-four, Carver came to Kansas as a teenager hungry for the education that was denied to him elsewhere.
He drifted through several towns before filing a homestead claim here in Ness County in eighteen eighty-six, living on the claim and working the soil while he observed the plants around him. He would not stay a farmer. Carver went on to become one of America's greatest agricultural scientists, developing hundreds of products from peanuts and sweet potatoes and transforming farming across the South.
This windswept claim, marked as the homestead of a genius, is where that remarkable life took root.
