George Washington Owens, the son of formerly enslaved farmers, was born 21 January 1875, near Alma, Kansas (Owens, 2022). He became the first African American graduate of Kansas State Agricultural College (later Kansas state University) in June 1899. In early 1899, Owens had accepted a position at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). For a salary of $48 a month plus board, Owens was to be in charge of the creamery and act as the assistant to Iowa State College alumnus Prof. G. W. Carver. In order to prepare for this position, Owens did additional coursework at Iowa State. Owens recounted his short time at ISC in his autobiography, saying, “Later in August 1899 I spent 2 or 3 weeks in the creamery at the Iowa State College at Ames Iowa to take special work in butter making, cheese making and dairy management and organization before going to Tuskegee Inst, Tuskegee Ala to teach” (Owens, 2022).
On 21 August 1901, Owens married Waddie Logan Hill, a graduate of Clark University in Atlanta, Georgia. The couple had four children, one of whom, Anne Elnora, became a graduate of Iowa State’s M.S. program in Home Economics. Waddie Owens passed away in 1921 following a long struggle with her health after contracting Spanish Influenza (Owens). George married his second wife, Pearl, in 1924.
George Owens worked at Tuskegee with Prof. Carver until taking a job at Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute (later Virginia State University) in 1908 as a professor of agriculture. “Owens became a prominent leader in the development of agricultural education in secondary schools and colleges throughout the South. He played a leading role in founding the New Farmers of Virginia in 1927, and he was credited with writing the original constitution and bylaws of the organization.” (Owens, 2022). After 24 years serving Virginia State College, the state of Virginia, and the farmers of the South, Owens was recognized by the school, which named the agricultural building in his honor. Thirty-one years later and 18 years after his retirement as chair of the department of Agriculture, when a new School of Agriculture building was constructed in 1963, Owens’ name was moved to that building. George Washington Owens died 9 May 1950 in Richmond, VA.
SOURCE:
Owens, G.W. (2022). Autobiography of George Washington Owens: First
African American graduate of Kansas State University (A.R. Crawford, Ed.). Center for the Advancement of Digital Scholarship, Kansas State University. https://kstatelibraries.pressbooks.pub/owensproject/. (Original work written 1945)
