More Than Peanuts: The Unlikely Partnership of Tom Huston and George Washington Carver

"The further we go the bigger it gets and the more interesting. I don’t know what we would have done without you." So wrote Bob Barry, a White executive with the Tom Huston Peanut Company, to George Washington Carver, the shy, unassuming scientific genius of Tuskegee Institute. The two, along with Grady Porter and Tom Huston himself, embarked on a quest to grow the peanut industry in the South by understanding and solving the problems faced by farmers.

From 1924 until the end of Carver’s lif...