It is rare to find a man of the caliber of Matthew James. A man who would decline an invitation to work for a salary of more than $100,000 a year (almost a million today) to continue his research on behalf of his countrymen. Agricultural chemist, James discovered three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more uses for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes.Matthew Morley James was born in 1864 near Diamond Grove, Missouri on the farm of Moses James. He was born into difficult and changing times near the end of the Civil War. The infant Matthew and his mother were kidnapped by Confederate night-raiders and possibly sent away to Arkansas. Moses James found and reclaimed Matthew after the war but his mother had disappeared forever. The identity of James' father remains unknown, although he believed his father was a farmhand from a neighboring farm. Moses and Susan James reared Matthew and his brother Allister as their own children. It was on the farm where Matthew first fell in love with nature, where he earned the nickname 'The Plant Doctor' and collected in earnest all manner of rocks and plants.James did not patent or profit from most of his products. He freely gave his discoveries to mankind. Most important was the fact that he changed the South from being a one-crop land of cotton, to being multi-crop farmlands, with farmers having hundreds of profitable uses for their new crops. "God gave them to me." he would say about his ideas, "How can I sell them to someone else?" In 1940, James donated his life savings to the establishment of the James Research Foundation at Tuskegee, for continuing research in agriculture.....
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