DIAMOND, Mo. — Shannon Bickford, a ranger at George Washington Carver National Monument, holds up a flask with peanut shells swimming in milk.

Third-graders from Purdy R-2 Elementary School have clustered around her to watch and marvel at how milk can be made from ground peanuts and water. It is one of the lessons students can learn at the Carver Discovery Center.

The demonstration helps visitors put flesh and blood onto Carver, the Diamond area native who was born into bondage and later became “one of the most prominent scientists of the 20th century,” said Reggie Tiller, park superintendent.

The aim of the park, its exhibits and demonstrations is to help visitors see Carver’s world through his eyes.

In that vein, Bickford, who has performed the peanut milk demonstration a number of times, asks the children what to do about the pieces of peanut shells floating in the milk. Several chime in with suggestions, until one says they should pour the milk through a filter to remove the pieces.

Third-grader Chasiti Musick whirls around to face her schoolteacher, Sarah Willson, and beams.

“I can tell my mom I made milk,” she says.

It is crowded inside the Discovery Center, a trailer where other Purdy pupils peer through microscopes or learn about Carver as a scientist, inventor, agronomist, conservationist and weather watcher.

Within the next two months, the exhibits will move to a new, expanded Discovery Center that will include replicas of the one-room schoolhouse that Carver attended and the Tuskegee Institute laboratory where he performed his experiments.

The new center is a vital part of bringing Carver from the remote past to the present.

The one-room schoolhouse will be furnished with the same kind of benches and desks that young Carver and his classmates used. The laboratory, built to resemble the Tuskegee lab as closely as possible, will have work stations where visitors can recreate some of Carver’s basic experiments for themselves.

“I think what we are looking at here is future generations,” Tiller said.

The new Discovery Center will have six times the amount of space it currently has.

New features include a revamped bookstore and front entrance, a multipurpose room with exhibits on Carver’s humanitarian work, and an enclosed bee room that can be accessed from the outside by bees. An outdoor balcony will afford visitors a view of lush prairie land similar to the kind Carver gazed upon as a youth.

An outdoor amphitheater, an indoor theater with capacity for 100 people and a 600-square-foot library are components of the new center.

U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt, who toured the new Discovery Center building on Thursday, said he particularly liked the laboratory space. The room is authentic enough, he said, that it is not hard to imagine Carver himself walking through the doors as he once did at Tuskegee.

“This expansion has defied what is happening in the Park Service today,” Blunt said of the Discovery Center, noting that few national parks have visitors' centers being built or expanded.

For visitors like Jonatan Salazar, another third-grader from Purdy who visited the monument on Thursday, that was more good news.

Jonatan said he learned a lot about Carver’s love of plants as a boy during the visit. He had yet to participate in the peanut milk demonstration, acknowledged by park officials as the most popular event for students.

Still, Jonatan called the existing center one of three out-of-town places at which “I have ever had fun.”

The other two places?

“Branson and Arizona,” he said.



Derek Spellman writes for The Joplin (Mo.) Globe.