Donation reunites George Washington Carver's birthplace

DIAMOND, Mo. -- The last 30 acres of George Washington Carver's birthplace have been donated to the National Park Service, after 50 years of efforts to acquire them and reunite the original farmstead.

"It is a fantastic thing to see happen," said Scott Bentley, a Park Service superintendent.

Carver, the educator and agriculturalist who is credited with developing more than 300 uses for peanuts, was born a slave around 1864 on the Newton County farm of Moses Carver in southwest Missouri.

The 240-acre farm has changed hands many times since Moses Carver sold it in 1894. Until Jan. 1, the final 30 acres had belonged to Evelyn Taylor, who lived there with her late husband, W.J. "Bud" Taylor, for almost a half-century.

"It's been a bit more than 150 years since the time when Moses Carver himself took over that piece of property," Kay Hively, a writer and historian from Neosho, said Saturday at a ceremony at the park's headquarters. "And now on this day, the Taylors are in effect giving it to the public."

The George Washington Carver Birthplace District Association, a nonprofit group, has eyed the property since 1953, hoping to reunite the original farm, Bentley said.

"The old road that Dr. Carver would've walked down as a boy, to go to Neosho to get his education, actually crosses that piece of property," he said.

But there was one obstacle to reuniting the site in southwest Missouri.

Two open shafts from abandoned zinc mines on the property pose a danger for park visitors, about 12,000 of whom each year are schoolchildren.

The shafts, vertical tunnels which once reached 175 feet into the ground, have largely been filled with natural debris, said Clint Bishop, construction manager for the Department of Natural Resources' Abandoned Mine Land Unit. Still, he added, the shafts extend down about 30 feet, and often are filled with water.

No donation could take place until the mines were made safe.

The DNR is doing just that, using a $25,000 state grant to begin closing the shafts next week, officials said. The work should be finished in two or three weeks, weather permitting, Bishop said.

"They're quite dangerous," he said. "For a kid it would be totally inescapable -- even an adult, to climb up those sides of the wall."

Hively, who also belongs to the birthplace association, said the land could yield another chapter in Carver's history.

"We'll never know all the day-to-day secrets of this land, but we no doubt can be sure there were times of joy, times of sadness, times of violence, death, birth and renewal," she said. "But as time goes by, and once we can get it into the hands of the park service, and more research can be done, we're going to start uncovering some of those great stories."