Secretary Wilson arrived at night accompanied by Dr. J.L.M. Curry, a Southerner, a leader of the educational thought of the South, and the secretary of the John F. Slater Fund Board. The students lined up on either side of the main thoroughfare through the school grounds with back of them a great gathering of the farmers from the surrounding territory and many from a distance. Each one of this great throng was given a pine torch and all these torches were simultaneously lighted as Secretary Wilson entered the school grounds. The Secretary and Doctor Curry, preceded by the Institute Band, rode between these two great masses of cheering people and flaming torches. The next day the dedication exercises were held on a specially constructed platform piled high with the finest specimens of every product known to that section of the South. On this platform, with the Secretary and Doctor Curry, were the State Commissioner of Agriculture and several other high State officials and many other prominent white citizens. This was the formal launching of the Agricultural Department of the school. George W. Carver, the full-blooded African and eminent agricultural scientist, of whom mention has already been made, had recently been placed in charge of this department. He had come from the Agricultural Department of Iowa State College, of which Secretary Wilson had been the head. The annual budget of this department alone is now nearly fifty thousand dollars a year, and more than a thousand acres of land are cultivated under the supervision of the agricultural staff. The modest building which Secretary Wilson helped to dedicate has long since been outgrown and the department is now housed in a large, impressive brick building known as the Millbank Agricultural Building. Under the provisions of the Smith-Lever Act, passed by Congress in 1914 for the purpose of aiding the States in Agricultural Extension Work, Booker Washington secured for Tuskegee a portion of the funds allotted to the State of Alabama for such work. With the aid of these funds Agricultural Extension Schools have been organized. These schools are conducted in cooperation with the Agricultural Department of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute and the farm demonstration work of the United States Department of Agriculture. They are really a two days' Short Course in Agriculture carried out to the farmers on their own farms. These schools have the advantage over the Short Course given to the farmers on the Institute grounds in that they have the farmers' problems right before them, to be diagnosed and remedies applied at once. Through such schools farm instruction is being carried to the Negroes of every Black Belt County of Alabama.