ISU “Firsts”

On our Iowa State campus tour, we walked by Carver Hall, named for George Washington Carver.

Carver was born into slavery in Diamond Grove, Missouri, sometime between 1860 and 1864. His parents were lost to Confederate slave raiders. Formal education of blacks was not widespread, and only through his own tenacity did Carver become Iowa State's first African-American college graduate, earning a bachelor of science degree in 1894 and a master of science degree in 1896. (This paragraph and the photo below are taken from “pollutionissues.com”)

From Wikipedia: In 1890, Carver started studying art and piano at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. His art teacher, Etta Budd, recognized Carver's talent for painting flowers and plants and convinced him to study botany at Iowa State Agricultural College in Ames. He transferred there in 1891, the first black student and later the first black faculty member. In order to avoid confusion with another George Carver in his classes, he began to use the name George Washington Carver. (The art teacher who recognized Carver’s talent for painting flowers and plants had the last name of “Budd”. How cool is that!)

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Here’s a “first” that stands tall on the ISU campus, The Marston Water Tower:

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In the Durham Building, we walked by a replica of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer:

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To wrap up this post……displayed all across campus were banners bearing names of Distinguished Alumni of ISU. I snapped a photo of one of them and it happens to be Theodore Kooser, a local Ames boy who became a Poet Laureate of the United States, and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2005.

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