Tuskegee’s School on Wheels
Courtesy of The New York Public Library
In the late 19th century, scientist George Washington Carver joined Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama as the dean of the Department of Agriculture and Experiment Station. After 1892, he increasingly spent time off campus training black farmers in agricultural techniques. Tuskegee outreach goal with black farmers had been to improve their productivity, increase their revenue streams, and as a result help them become debt free and build wealth. In order to reach larger numbers of isolated rural black farmers, Tuskegee President Book T. Washington and Carver developed a school on wheels outfitted with equipment for demonstrating affective farming strategies. Morris K. Jessup funded the project which Tuskegee staff called the Jessup Agricultural Wagon, for short the Jessup Wagon. Carver and his staff would promote weeklong instruction at a centrally located part of a county. Over time, the news that Tuskegee had planned to send a school on wheels to a locale near them spread like wildfire from one black owned farm to another.
