Groves, Junius George
1859-1925 · Contribution: 1880-1925
Developed scientific potato-growing methods that produced record-breaking yields, earning the USDA's 1902 title “Potato King of the World” and building one of the largest African American-owned farming operations in U.S. history
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Impact on the world
Arriving in Kansas in 1879 as an Exoduster with ninety cents to his name, Groves applied increasingly sophisticated agricultural science to potato cultivation, eventually producing 396 bushels per acre against a neighborhood average of 25 and, in 1902, growing 721,500 bushels in a single season — more than any other farmer in the world, a feat that earned him the U.S. Department of Agriculture's title “Potato King of the World.” He built his holdings to more than 760 acres of potatoes, orchards, and vineyards near Edwardsville, Kansas, with his own Union Pacific rail spur for shipping; Booker T. Washington profiled him in The Negro in Business (1907) as “our most successful Negro farmer.” He used his fortune, estimated at $300,000 by 1915, to found Groves Center, a community where he sold affordable land to Black families, built one of the first golf courses for African Americans in the country, and co-founded the Kansas State Negro Business League and the Kaw Valley Potato Association.
Life & background
Born into slavery on April 12, 1859, in Green County, Kentucky, to Martin and Mary Anderson Groves, Groves received only sporadic schooling but developed a lifelong devotion to self-education. He walked to Kansas in 1879 during the Exoduster migration of formerly enslaved people leaving the post-Reconstruction South, working first at Armourdale meatpacking houses before sharecropping nine acres near Edwardsville with farmer Jake Williamson. He married Matilda E. Stewart in 1880, and the couple had fifteen children, twelve of whom survived to adulthood; several of his sons attended Kansas State Agricultural College and brought formal scientific training back to the family operation. Beyond farming, Groves owned a general store, held stock in mines and Kansas banks, and controlled a majority interest in the Kansas City Casket and Embalming Company, while founding the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Society in 1886. He suffered financial setbacks in the 1920s, including a costly failed cattle venture, and died of a heart attack in Edwardsville on August 17, 1925; his funeral reportedly drew over 3,000 mourners. In 2021 he was inducted into the Kansas Business Hall of Fame alongside figures like Walter Chrysler, and a 2025 documentary, “The Potato King,” revisited his story for Kansas City PBS.
Sources
- BlackPast.org; Legends of Kansas; Kansas Historical Society (Kansapedia); Flatland KC
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