A Centennial Tribute honoring Alabama's Three Extension Visionaries
Channel: Alabama Extension
Date: 2014-10-04

Many Americans of many temperaments, talents and racial and ethnic backgrounds helped paint the rich mosaic that we know today as Cooperative Extension.   Much of the mosaic can be attributed to the efforts of one man, Booker T. Washington, who led an agricultural and mechanical school known then as the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute.  

He, along with famed Tuskegee Institute researcher George Washington Carver, understood that the insights generated at Tuskegee and other agricultural research facilities across the United States would be fully utilized only if they were successfully communicated directly to farmers where they lived and worked.  

They pioneered the use of agricultural demonstration wagons, known as Jesup Wagons or Movable Schools.  Washington appointed star Tuskegee student Thomas Monroe Campbell to oversee the implementation of this grand vision.  These wagons, launched in 1906, were dispatched to far-flung regions of Alabama to provide producers with the most efficient farming methods.

Without being fully aware of it at the time, Washington and Carver transformed Extension work.
  
The first 100 years of Cooperative Extension work are due in no small measure to these three men who acquainted Americans with practical knowledge in a way that had never been tried before — knowledge that not only empowered people, but in a great number of cases, actually saved them.

In this Centennial Year, it is with immense pride that the Alabama Cooperative Extension System salutes these three Cooperative Extension visionaries from Alabama without whom the Extension legacy would not have been possible: Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and Thomas Monroe Campbell.