The George Washington Carver Museum in Dothan, Alabama honors African American inventors, explorers, and scientists, including George Washington Carver himself. Exhibits showcase early black invention in the Southern US, scientific contributions, and explorations. The museum also highlights the inventions of numerous black inventors, including the blood bank, the lawn mower, and the refrigerator. Carver’s work revolutionized agriculture, but he only received three patents. The museum seeks to give him and other black inventors their due.
The George Washington Carver Museum seeks to offer visitors a wide-ranging history and insight into early African American inventors, explorers, and scientists, as well as noting the contributions of African Americans to social change and the military. The Dothan, Alabama museum is named for an agronomist and agricultural chemist who was born a slave in 1861 and became director of agricultural research at the Tuskegee Normal Institute in 1896.
Several exhibits at the George Washington Carver Museum focus on the man who inspired the museum, as well as other black inventors and scientists. The exhibits include an installation on the early years of black invention in the Southern United States, when inventions pertained to southern industry. A second exhibition focuses on explorations. A third exhibit showcases scientific contributions and discoveries, many of which have helped Southern agriculture thrive.
Numerous inventors descended from the Caribbean and Africa have invented objects that are taken for granted today, in fields as diverse as medicine, industry and physics. These inventions include the blood bank, the lawn mower, the refrigerator, the dryer, the electric cart, the pencil sharpener, and the dustpan, just to name a few. Featured inventors at the George Washington Carver Museum include the inventor of X-rays, George Alcorn; the inventor of the potato chip, George Crum; the inventor of the blood bank, Charles Drew; the inventor of 3-D glasses, Kenneth Dunkley; the inventor of the gas mask, Garrett Morgan; and the inventor of home security measures, Marie van Brittan Brown, among others.
George Washington Carver, like the museum’s namesake, is also billed as the inventor of hundreds of peanut products, including dark chocolate and peanut mayonnaise. Other peanut applications include coffee, milk, flour, cheese, medicinal oils, soap, ink, and wood stains. He has developed uses for sweet potatoes, pecans and soybeans, with applications of sweet potatoes numbering more than 100, including the glue used on postage stamps, ink, vinegar, flour and molasses. He has devised a process for turning soybeans into paint products and has also developed new dyes.
Despite George Washington Carver’s inventions and discoveries that revolutionized agriculture, he received only three patents. His work showed that peanuts could be a vital and valuable crop, something not known before. Peanuts, in addition to his crop rotation method, improved the weak agriculture of the South. The George Washington Carver Museum seeks to give him and other black inventors and pioneers their due.
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