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The George Washington Carver Museum is a museum located in Tuskegee, Alabama, United States. It is a part of the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site. The museum, located on the campus of Tuskegee University, is managed by the US National Park Service, with self-guided tours.
The George Washington Carver Museum has several exhibits, including crop rotation theories that helped the Southern United States's economy boom, and the history of George Washington Carver himself.
The museum consists of many exhibits, interpretive programs, a book sales area and two introductory films on George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, and are available at the museum.[ citation needed ]
The museum was developed with substantial support from admirer and industrialist Henry Ford. Carver wanted the fruits of his life's work on display at the museum. He hoped that the exhibits would inspire children to live better lives.
The original museum was housed in a remodeled building and was filled with Carver's geological and mycological (fungus) specimens made over a lifetime. Carver's artwork and crafts were also displayed in the museum. Mounted regional bird specimens and giant vegetables preserved in jars that he used as "show and tell" at farm and county fair demonstrations became part of the museum.
Carver first served as Director of the Agricultural Department where he developed agricultural extension services for black farmers and homemakers. Milbank Hall was the site of his agricultural experiments. His last laboratory was housed in the Carver Museum.
Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) donated the home of Booker T. Washington and the Carver Museum to the National Park Service in 1977, and much of the Carver collection in 1979. [1]
For more than forty years, Dr George Washington Carver labored at Tuskegee Institute. He was the son of a slave woman, whose owner was named Moses Carver. [2] Carver remained on Moses' estate until he was 12 years of age. He would paint pictures of flowers, plants, and landscapes. [3] He never ceased efforts to improve the living conditions and surroundings of rural and farm people - particularly those who lived in the South - and to extract from nature through scientific research those elements and resources which could be made useful for the benefit of mankind. Many honors came to him during his lifetime, but none gave him more genuine pleasure and satisfaction than his own museum. It was always his wish that everything he did would be available to the public for the general good of all.
The George Washington Carver Museum was authorized by the trustees of Tuskegee Institute in 1938 at the request of President Frederick D. Patterson. The museum, formerly the school laundry, housed Dr Carver's extensive collections of native plants, minerals, birds and vegetables; his products from the peanut, sweet potato and clays; and his numerous paintings, drawings, and textile art. The museum was formally dedicated by Mr and Mrs Henry Ford in 1941. In January 1943, Dr Carver died and was buried in the Campus Cemetery.
In 1947, a fire caused great loss in the museum. Fortunately, many of Dr Carver's products were not seriously damaged. However, only a few of his paintings were saved, those mostly damaged by smoke and water. When the building was renovated in 1951, it was enlarged to include a basement exhibit area. With a total area of 13,000 square feet (1,200 m2), it became a general repository for historic and modern treasures donated to Tuskegee Institute or removed from campus buildings. The museum also held an extensive collection of African crafts and artifacts. Over 300 bound volumes and rare pamphlets of south, central and west coast Africa, and more than 1000 photographs of life in Ghana and Nigeria were included.
Between 1951 and 1962, Bess Bolden Walcott served as the curator of the museum. Her work as a curator of the museum led to its becoming a National Park Service site. [4] The Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site was authorized in 1974 and established on November 13, 1977. The George Washington Carver Museum, along with the Booker T. Washington home "The Oaks," was then deeded to the people of the United States.
Both the museum and The Oaks (the home of Booker T. Washington) were closed to the public in February 1980 to undergo restoration and refurbishing. Restoration was the focus for the museum's exterior. The building's interior was gutted and rebuilt to house exhibits, artifact storage space, staff offices, an auditorium where audiovisual programs are conducted, and an elevator for disabled persons.
The main exhibit area of the museum is divided into two sections. One section focuses on the comprehensive career of Dr Carver. Within this area is some of his laboratory equipment, including salvaged parts of discarded equipment with which he set up his first laboratory. Dr Carver had begun his research with only one true piece of scientific equipment: a microscope. Also included are samples of peanut and sweet potato products. The exhibits of his paintings, embroidery and needlework interpret the artistic talents of Dr Carver. On display are plaques, medals and artistic work created in tribute to Dr Carver.
The second section of the museum leads the visitor through the growth and development of Tuskegee Institute, founded in 1881, to the present day Tuskegee University. Through photographs and artifacts, the exhibits outline the school's accomplishments through extension work and the compilation of statistics on Black life are interpreted.
Returning visitors from the 1940s through the 1970s will note a smaller number of artifacts on display. It has not been necessary to exhibit several hundred extra items in order to provide a comprehensive interpretive experience. Items not on display are stored in a controlled environment. Ownership of a large selection of African artifacts formerly displayed in the museum was retained by Tuskegee University.
George Washington Carver was an American agricultural scientist and inventor who promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. He was one of the most prominent black scientists of the early 20th century.
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, and orator. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the primary leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary Black elite.
Tuskegee is a city in Macon County, Alabama, United States. General Thomas Simpson Woodward, a Creek War veteran under Andrew Jackson, laid out the city and founded it in 1833. It became the county seat in the same year and it was incorporated in 1843. It is the most populous city in Macon County. At the 2020 census the population was 9,395, down from 9,865 in 2010 and 11,846 in 2000.
Tuskegee University is a private, historically black land-grant university in Tuskegee, Alabama. It was founded on July 4th in 1881 by the Alabama Legislature.
Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, at Moton Field in Tuskegee, Alabama, commemorates the contributions of African-American airmen in World War II. Moton Field was the site of primary flight training for the pioneering pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen, and is now operated by the National Park Service to interpret their history and achievements. It was constructed in 1941 as a new training base. The field was named after former Tuskegee Institute principal Robert Russa Moton, who died the previous year.
Robert Russa Moton was an American educator and author. He served as an administrator at Hampton Institute. In 1915 he was named principal of Tuskegee Institute, after the death of founder Booker T. Washington, a position he held for 20 years until retirement in 1935.
Robert Robinson Taylor was an American architect and educator. Taylor was the first African-American student enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the first accredited African-American architect when he graduated in 1892. He was an early and influential member of the Tuskegee Institute faculty.
The National Museum of the United States Navy, or U.S. Navy Museum for short, is the flagship museum of the United States Navy and is located in the former Breech Mechanism Shop of the old Naval Gun Factory on the grounds of the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., United States.
A peanut butter cookie is a type of cookie that is distinguished for having peanut butter as a principal ingredient. The cookie originated in the United States, its development dating back to the 1910s.
The George Washington Carver Museum may refer to several different things. These include:
Isaac Scott Hathaway was an African American artist who worked in different genres of art, including ceramics and sculpture.
Betsy Graves Reyneau (1888–1964) was an American painter, best known for a series of paintings of prominent African Americans for the exhibition “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin” that, with those by Laura Wheeler Waring and under the Harmon Foundation, toured the United States from 1944 to 1954. A granddaughter of Michigan Supreme Court Justice Benjamin F. Graves, Reyneau's sitters included Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver, Joe Louis, and Thurgood Marshall. Reyneau's portrait of Carver, the most famous, was the first of an African American to enter a national American collection.
Louis Rayfield Purnell, Sr. was a noted curator at the United States' National Air and Space Museum and earlier in life, a decorated Tuskegee Airman. At the museum, he became expert in space flight artifacts, particularly spacesuits, and was instrumental in curating artifacts related to space exploration, during the pivotal years of the 1960s and into the 1980s. Purnell was the first African-American to become a curator at the Smithsonian Institution.
Prentice Herman Polk was an American photographer known for his portraits of African Americans. He also served for several years as head of the Tuskegee Institute's Department of Photography.
Bess Bolden Walcott (1886-1988) was an American educator, librarian, museum curator and activist who helped establish the historical significance of the Tuskegee University. Recruited by Booker T. Washington to help him coordinate his library and teach science, she remained at the institute until 1962, but continued her service into the 1970s. Throughout her fifty-four year career at Tuskegee, she organized Washington's library, taught science and English at the institute, served as founder and editor of two of the major campus publications, directed public relations, established the Red Cross chapter, curated the George Washington Carver collection and museum and assisted in Tuskegee being placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
John Andrew Kenney Sr. was an African-American surgeon who was the medical director and chief surgeon of the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, from 1902 to 1922. He served as secretary of the National Medical Association (NMA) from 1904 to 1912, and was elected president of the NMA in 1912. He was the editor-in-chief of its journal, the Journal of the National Medical Association, from 1916 to 1948. He also served as the personal physician of both Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver.
Charles C. Dawson was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, and graphic designer.
The American Negro Exposition, also known as the Black World's Fair and the Diamond Jubilee Exposition, was a world's fair held in Chicago from July until September in 1940, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of slavery in the United States at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865.
Kenneth F. Space (1903–1971) was a pictorial journalist, documentary filmmaker, cinematographer and commercial photographer in the 1930s and 1940s. He is most known with his photographic and documentary film work capturing African American life in the American South for the Harmon Foundation.
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