On July 19, 1942, the agricultural chemist George Washington Carver, head of Alabama’s famed Tuskegee Institute, arrived in Dearborn, Michigan at the invitation of Henry Ford. Ford visited Carver several times in Tuskegee and admired his work. He wanted Carver to come to Michigan to devise a way to develop a synthetic rubber to help compensate for wartime rubber shortages. He and Ford eventually found a way to make a rubber substitute from the weed, goldenrod.
