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GAVE UP ART CAREER FOR HIS RACE

THIRTY-EIGHT years ago a fraillooking Negro lad, an ex-slave, entered Ames College, Iowa, to specialize in agricultural science. The excitement awakened by a Negro listed in the cause of scientific agriculture was greatly heightened when it was learned that the young man was a painter and designer with a career already well assured.

"Why not push your studies along this line to some extent ?" remonstrated James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, then a teacher at Ames.

"Because," was the reply, "I can be of no service to my race with this."

These words marked the farewell to the brush as a calling for Prof. George W. Carver, Director of the Agricultural Research and Experiment Station, of Tuskegee Institute, Alabama.

Professor Carver's experiments and instruction at Tuskegee Institute have been invariably with common things-with just such things as the farmers, housewives and school teachers in Alabama have to deal with every day with the cow pea, the wild plum, the sweet potato, cotton, with the com

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mon shrubs and plants about Macon County, Alabama, where Tuskegee Institute is located, and with the soil and its various uses.

It was hardly a decade ago that

the cow pea in Alabama, indeed in the whole South, was regarded as a little less than a contemptible weed. It was fed to the cows or left to rot on the land for fertilizer. That man was poor indeed, a poor "red neck" or "hill-side darkey" who served this vegetable as a food for man. This despised product was a subject of Professor Carver's early experiments. Applying his chemistry to the growing of the cow pea, he soon turned it into a delectable food. Perhaps the experiment which will come nearest to a direct national benefit is that which Professor Carver is now making on various kinds of clay. This claywhite, yellow, and bluetakes the place of lime and the various washes compounded by plasterers. Mixed with water it will wash a rough surface as successfully as will lime. Mixed with turpentine it becomes a rich stain for furniture.

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F you should hunt the country over you would hardly find a more remarkable family than the six Price brothers and one of the remarkable things about them is that they were brought up on a little eighty-eight acre farm in Ohio.

Here are the six: Ira M. Price, Ph. D., LL. D., the oldest, Professor of Semitic languages in the University of Chicago; S. Eber Price, President of Ottawa University at Ottawa, Kansas; Enoch J. Price, practicing law in Chicago; Milo B. Price, Ph. D., Principal of Pillsbury Academy, Owatonna, Minn.; Rev. Orlo J. Price, Ph. D., pastor of the First Baptist Church, Lansing, Michigan; Homer C. Price, Dean of the Agricultural department, Ohio State University.

These are the six living. brothers. Mark E., a farmer, died three years ago, and Asa E. died in

HOMER.

IRA.

First, the farm to bring them up on-only eighty-eight acres. Second, their father, Thomas David Price. If he had had a big plantation of a thousand acres on which the boys needed only to scratch. and not to dig and help their father make

a living for the family, thereby making a living for themselves, they might not have achieved such success.

The proximity of Denison University enabled Mr. Price to keep up the habit of work, in his boys, as well as to gratify his desire to give them an education. Go off to college and spend their patrimony? Not exactly. When Ira, the oldest, started, he walked, the first year, back and forth each day. The second year, he rode horseback. The third year, having kept his constitution up to standard, he boarded at the school and got down to business in a still more thorough way. The rest of the eight boys followed the same schedule, walked one year, rode one year, boarded the remaining years. Ira is now fifty-five years old, Homer thirtysix. That shows how long the Price procession was in passing through college.

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THE MOTHER.

his freshman year at Denison University. Eight boys in all, no girls; all the boys college trained, five of them graduates of Denison University, two of them from the state University, three of them with the doctor's degree from Leipsig University in Germany-such is the record.

I. EBER.

That eighty-eight acre farm will be found to have had no little to do with the success of these men. When you dig down and search for reasons, you will find those reasons growing in two branches.

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ENOCH.

It is quite possible, that those Saturdays on the farm heightened. the respect of those young men for the professional life and tightened their grip on the ambition for that life.

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ORLO.

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the stream as though driven by a catapult, and countless expeditions were halted while vain search was made for drowned voyageurs and lost goods. Many a successful trapper, floating his bales of furs to St. Louis, after a season or two of hazard on the beaver streams at the Missouri headwaters, was caught by a snag in the boiling, muddy river, or thrown against a sandbar in midstream, and was heard of no more. The small steamboats that navigated the Missouri in later days had to. combat a swifter current and a more uncertain channel than the big boats that plied the Mississippi.

in watering adjacent lands in time of drought, and in unwatering the land back of the protecting levees in time of flood

but the Sacramento is gentleness itself compared with the Missouri. Operating pumping steamers in a current that averages eight or nine miles an hour, would be clearly impossible. Anchors would be ripped out of the muddy bottom, if not by the force of the current itself, then by the impact of the great trees that come hurtling down stream when the June freshet is on. To establish an ordinary concrete pumping plant was equally out of the question, as the engineers at such an institution would be likely to wake up some morning and find their pumps empty, with the Missouri gurgling mockingly half a mile

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ONE OF THE
FIRST PROBLEMS
THE ENGINEER
MET WITH.

A siphon was put in
to carry over the wa-
ter for the Williston
pumping project.

In seasons of heavy floods and succeeding droughts, there has been a variation of nineteen feet in the Missouri river level at Williston. The main channel has been known to shift half a mile, for no apparent reason.

away.

H. A. Storrs, the government engineer in charge of the work, finally decided to

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