George Washington Carver, an African-American scientist and educator best known for his research on peanuts, also studied and collected microfungi, a type of fungus that does not form a mushroom.

Students at UW-Madison are in the process of doing a digital upgrade on the microfungi collection at the university, numbering as many as 120,000 specimens, the second-largest collection in the country.

The work includes entering samples information into a database. When a North Carolina database user contacted the herbarium at UW-Madison, asking if an Alabama fungus was mistakenly entered as an Alaska fungus, the query resulted in the rediscovery of Carver’s contributions to the collection.

Herbarium curator Mary Ann Feist said Carver’s name was discovered on the Alabama fungus in question. More digging found a total of 25 fungus samples from Carver.

“With roughly 100,000 samples remaining to be processed, that number will likely rise,” the university said in a statement Friday.

The Wisconsin State Herbarium not only has fungi but also houses plants and lichens, more than 1.2 million samples in all. The vast collection started when the university was formed in 1848.

Collections at the herbarium can go unnoticed and untouched for years. The National Science Foundation gave money for new cabinets for the UW-Madison collection, and also funded the databasing there and at 36 other national fungus collections.

“The microfungi collection was sitting unappreciated for, I’m guessing, 50 years, in old wooden cabinets in the hallway,” said herbarium director Ken Cameron.

Carver most likely sent samples to UW-Madison because of the herbarium’s reputation for excellence, Cameron said.

Carver was born a slave in Diamond, Missouri, in the early 1860s. He was the first black student at what now is Iowa State University, then became ISU’s first black faculty member.

The majority of his teaching and research years were spent at the Tuskegee Institute (now University) in Alabama, where he directed agricultural science, teaching African-Americans how to farm.

“At Tuskegee, he studied blights as well as agricultural techniques, and established agricultural stations to train black farmers in agricultural technology,” said history professor William Jones. “This is similar to what UW-Extension does: empowering farmers with the knowledge to help them succeed.”

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