Cotton Robinson: The NC State Plant Geneticist Who Saved Western Carolina

NC State professor Harold Frank Robinson (center).

© Tim Peeler, 2019

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What are 40 bushels of raw potatoes, some manual labor in a college kitchen and a lifelong devotion to education and research worth?

For Harold Frank Robinson and the people of western North Carolina, it’s meant generations of well-educated graduates from the most rural parts of the state, in the most remote outpost in the 17-institution University of North Carolina system.

Up on the banks of the Tuckasegee River, built on the remnants of a Cherokee Indian Village, Cullowhee first had a secondary school in 1889, the same year NC State opened its doors. It eventually became Cullowhee Normal and Industrial School, Cullowhee State Normal School, Western Carolina Teachers College and, since 1967, Western Carolina University.

About the time it joined the UNC System, Western Carolina hired a two-time NC State graduate, a former professor and university administrator to revive a lagging institution.

Robinson – or “Cotton” to all who knew him well – was a native of Mitchell County’s Bandana community in the high mountains of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest. Though he wanted to operate his own general store, his family paid for his first year of education at Mars Hill College with a promise of potatoes and diligent work in the kitchen.

After a year, he transferred to NC State College in Raleigh, where he earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in crop science just before the start of World War II. He served as a line officer in the U.S. Navy from 1941-45, fighting German U-boats in Mediterranean waters. At the end of the war and just after, he was the navigator of the escort carrier Saginaw Bay.

He eventually joined the experimental statistics faculty, working under pioneering departmental founder Gertrude Cox. He earned a doctorate in genetics and plant breeding at Nebraska in 1948 and became a full professor at NC State in 1951. He founded the department of genetics in 1958 and was named director of the Institute of Biological Sciences in 1962.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Robinson executive director of the presidential Science Advisory Committee on the World Food Supply, which produced important studies on world food supply and population.

He left NC State to work in academic affairs at Georgia in 1968 and was named provost at Purdue in 1971.

In 1974, he was called home to become the chancellor at Western Carolina, a move that particularly pleased his Waynesville-native wife Katherine.

During his tenure, Western Carolina experienced unprecedented growth and expansion, raising the profile of the former teacher’s college to an internationally acclaimed center for mountain and indigenous peoples’ heritage, along with its mission to produce well-trained education specialists for the state of North Carolina.

From his NCpedia profile:

“The new chancellor went to Western Carolina in 1974 after the university had experienced a period of administrative instability. Morale among students, faculty, and staff was low. With characteristic energy Robinson launched a number of initiatives simultaneously, all signaling that he would be an activist chancellor. For the next ten years he worked diligently and tirelessly, while expecting the same effort by the faculty and administrative staff, to secure for Western Carolina University curricular expansion, increased state appropriations, and a broader service area. A strengthened faculty and curriculum in Cullowhee were to be the basis for regional programs.

“During the decade Robinson was chancellor, Western Carolina University experienced impressive development. Undergraduate programs increased from 68 to 90 and graduate programs, from 43 to 80. Emphasis was placed on new programs in fast-growing career fields and on preprofessional programs. Two new schools—the School of Technology and Applied Science and the School of Nursing and Health Sciences—were founded to reflect this emphasis. Library holdings, housed in a modern new facility, increased from 442,301 to 1,037,070. The physical plant doubled in value to $100 million and total expenditures rose from $16.2 million to $42.7 million. Cooperative education, army ROTC, graduate programs in Asheville, and a Western Carolina Center in Cherokee all were initiatives of special interest to the chancellor. Reflecting his concern for western North Carolina, Robinson was instrumental in establishing the Center for Improving Mountain Living to promote economic development and the Mountain Heritage Center to preserve the region's history and culture. Annually the celebration of Mountain Heritage Day, replete with mountain crafts and music, drew thousands of people to the Western Carolina campus.”

In an interview after his 1984 retirement, Robinson said he returned to his home region as a way to give back to the community and region where he grew up.

“I wanted to do something for my people here in western North Carolina, and I saw WCU as an opportunity to build and institution dedicated and committed to serving the people of the region,” he said.

President Jimmy Carter appointed Robinson to serve on the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development and was named to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Joint Council of Food and Agricultural Science.

Ever the plant geneticist, Robison conducted a research project at his home in which he purified Cherokee Indian corn, returning it to its original state.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with Saturday’s NC State-Western Carolina football game at 12:30 p.m. at Carter-Finley Stadium. But it does show that the state institutions, located some 250 miles apart, are closely tied to each other historically regardless of the outcome on the gridiron.