Atlanta Daily World

Honoring A Worthy Man

There is a bill pending before Congress for the purchase of the old farm on which Dr. George W. Carver was born. That is a tribute to a worthy individual who next to Thomas Edison has been felt in his sphere in the world. Truly the world has been made better and much wiser by his having lived in it. It is needless to recite the many discoveries Dr. Carver has made in the field of science and economics. Hardly in any venture touching these phases does his work remain an outcast.

Dr. Carver has now so immortalized the little farm upon which he was born and traded for a horse to the extent that the national government would take it over for posterity as a worthy monument. Here is the possibility of a little slave boy, born in the dark days, bringing into this world such a compelling genius that his memory will live longer than that of those who were his owners and who swapped him for a saddle horse. But for this genius that saddle horse would have long gone the way of all forgotten. Like the widow's mite that horse has passed down the ages in immortality, not for what he was worth as a good saddle horse, but for the find for which he was swapped.

That is a befitting gesture of the national government. This would possibly be the first time in history that a whole farm was bought as a memorial to an individual. This would take us back to one of the great parables of our Lord—in which a man findeth a precious stone and he goeth and seeks out the owner and buyeth the whole field in order to get that stone.