PEORIA, Ill. (25 News – After 100 years, the George Washington Carver Community Center is officially receiving recognition from the Illinois State Historical Society.
The marker was unveiled Sunday during a ceremony outside of the center.
Carver was a profound agricultural scientist and inventor who developed hundreds of products using peanuts.
The Carver Center was created in the 1920s to provide Black people with educational, recreational, and mentoring programs during the Great Migration, Great Depression, and World War Two.
Some of the programs included are preschool classes, a library, recreation, music, woodwork, youth clubs, and adult sewing classes.
Jacobie Proctor, the current CEO, says this center is needed now more than ever.
“The things that Carver has offered are needed in our community. We need education. We need sports and recreation. We need daycare, things that stood the test of time and this is a reflection of that,” said Proctor.
During the 1950s to the 1970s, kids and teens would flock to the center for dances, talent shows, prom, student council, choir, sports, games, and Boys and Girls Scouts.
Both the United Way and the Colored Women’s Aid Club helped to finance the center’s growth.
Proctor says with those organizations’ help, the center became a hub for people to go and utilize its resources.
”It’s been needed for a century. We had offered tools and resources that answer the calls of the under-marginalized that were misrepresented or under-represented. And today, we changed that,” Proctor said.
The new historical marker is placed outside of the building.
With this designation, the Carver Center is officially declared a historic site in Illinois.
