George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver was born George Carver on a farm near Diamond, Missouri. The exact date of his birth is unknown. The National Park Service lists his birthday as July 12, 1864, and many other sources agree he likely was born around 1864. Yet, some list 1861 or 1865 as his birth year.

In his earliest years, George was enslaved. Before he was born, a white farm owner named Moses Carver purchased George’s mother, Mary, when she was 13 years old in 1855. Moses was reportedly against slavery but needed help with his 240-acre farm.

When George was an infant, he, his mother and his sister were kidnapped from the Carver farm by one of the bands of slave raiders that roamed Missouri during the Civil War era. They were resold in Kentucky. Moses hired a neighbor to retrieve them, but the neighbor only succeeded in finding George, whom he purchased by trading one of Moses’ finest horses.

George grew up knowing little about his mother or his father, who had died in an accident before he was born. Moses and his wife, Susan, raised young George and his brother James as their own and taught the boys how to read and write. Although James gave up his studies and focused on working the fields with Moses, George was a frail and sickly child who could not help with such work. Instead, Susan taught him how to cook, mend, embroider, do laundry and garden, as well as how to concoct simple herbal medicines.

At a young age, George took a keen interest in plants and experimented with natural pesticides, fungicides and soil conditioners. He became known as the “the plant doctor” to local farmers due to his ability to discern how to improve the health of their gardens, fields and orchards.

At age 11, Carver left the farm to attend an all-Black school in the nearby town of Neosho, Missouri. He was taken in by Andrew and Mariah Watkins, a childless Black couple who gave him a roof over his head in exchange for help with household chores. A midwife and nurse, Mariah imparted her broad knowledge of medicinal herbs to Carver as well as her devout faith. He stayed for about two years before moving to Kansas. The move was sparked by Carver’s disappointment with the education he received at the Neosho school.

Carver joined numerous other Black people who were traveling west. For the next decade or so, he moved from one Midwestern town to another, putting himself through school and surviving off of the domestic skills he learned from his foster mothers.

He graduated from Minneapolis High School in Minneapolis, Kansas, in 1880 and applied to Highland College in Kansas (today’s Highland Community College). He was initially accepted at the all-white college but was later rejected when the administration learned he was Black.

In the late 1880s, Carver befriended the Milhollands, a white couple in Winterset, Iowa, who encouraged him to pursue higher education again. He enrolled in Simpson College, a Methodist school that admitted all qualified applicants. Carver initially studied art and piano in hopes of earning a teaching degree, but one of his professors, Etta Budd, was skeptical of a Black man being able to make a living as an artist. After learning of his interests in plants and flowers, Budd encouraged Carver to apply to the Iowa State Agricultural School (now Iowa State University) to study botany.

In 1894, Carver became the first African American to earn a bachelor of science degree. Impressed by Carver’s research on the fungal infections of soybean plants, his professors asked him to stay on for graduate studies. The bright young scholar worked with famed mycologist (fungal scientist) L.H. Pammel at the Iowa State Experimental Station, honing his skills in identifying and treating plant diseases.

In 1896, Carver earned his master of agriculture degree and immediately received several offers, the most attractive of which came from Booker T. Washington—whose last name George would later add to his own—of Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. Washington convinced the university’s trustees to establish an agricultural school, which could only be run by Carver if Tuskegee was to keep its all-Black faculty. Carver accepted the offer and worked at Tuskegee Institute for the rest of his life.

Carver’s early years at Tuskegee were not without hiccups.

For one, agriculture training was not popular. Southern farmers believed they already knew how to farm, and students saw schooling as a means to escape farming work. Additionally, many faculty members resented Carver for his high salary and his occupation of two dormitory rooms, one for him and one for his plant specimens.

Carver also struggled with the demands of the faculty position he held. He wanted to devote his time to researching agriculture in order to help out poor Southern farmers, but he was also expected to manage the school’s two farms, teach, ensure the school’s toilets and sanitary facilities worked properly and sit on multiple committees and councils.

Carver and Washington had a complicated relationship and butted heads often, in part because Carver wanted little to do with teaching (though he was beloved by his students). Carver eventually got his way when Washington died in 1915 and was succeeded by Robert Russa Moton, who relieved the researcher of his teaching duties except for summer school.

Carver is responsible for many inventions, including the Jesup wagon, sweet potato–based dyes and paints and more than 300 food, industrial and commercial products from peanuts. The scientist also popularized a crop-rotation technique that revolutionized farming across the South.

Founding the Tuskegee Institute Movable School in the early 1900s allowed Carver to make successful inroads in the community. In 1906, he invented the Jesup wagon, a type of mobile classroom and laboratory, in order to travel from farm to farm and demonstrate soil chemistry. The first model was a horse-drawn wagon that cost $674 to build and outfit (about $3,600 today), according to the Smithsonian Institution. He later adapted a truck into a more modern version of the Jesup wagon.

Carver taught poor farmers that they could feed hogs acorns instead of commercial feed and enrich croplands with swamp muck instead of fertilizers. But it was his ideas regarding crop rotation that proved to be most valuable to farmers.

Through his work on soil chemistry, Carver learned that years of growing cotton had depleted the nutrients from the South’s soil, resulting in low yields. But by growing nitrogen-fixing plants like peanuts, soybeans and sweet potatoes, the soil could be restored, allowing yield to increase dramatically when the land was reverted to cotton use a few years later.

Farmers, of course, loved the high yields of cotton they were now getting from Carver’s crop-rotation technique. But the method had an unintended consequence: a surplus of peanuts and other non-cotton products. Carver set to work on finding alternative uses for these products.

Carver invented numerous products from sweet potatoes, including edible products like flour and vinegar and non-food items such as stains, dyes, paints and writing ink. But his biggest success as an inventor came from peanuts.

In all, he developed more than 300 food, industrial and commercial products from peanuts, including milk, Worcestershire sauce, punches, cooking oils, salad oil, paper, cosmetics, soaps and wood stains. He also experimented with peanut-based medicines, such as antiseptics, laxatives and goiter medications. It should be noted that many of these suggestions or discoveries remained curiosities and did not find widespread applications.

In 1921, Carver appeared before the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on behalf of the peanut industry, which was seeking tariff protection. Although his testimony did not begin well, he described the wide range of products that could be made from peanuts, which not only earned him a standing ovation but also convinced the committee to approve a high protected tariff for the common legume. He then became known as “The Peanut Man.”

In the last two decades of his life, Carver lived as a minor celebrity, but his focus was always on helping people. He traveled the South to promote racial harmony, and he traveled to India to discuss nutrition in developing nations with Mahatma Gandhi.

Between 1898 and 1943, the year of his death, he released bulletins for the public. Some of these reported on research findings, but many others were more practical in nature and included cultivation information for farmers, science for teachers and recipes for homemakers.

In the mid-1930s, when the polio virus raged in America, Carver became convinced that peanuts were the answer. He offered a treatment of peanut oil massages and reported positive results, though no scientific evidence exists that the treatments worked. The benefits patients experienced were likely due to the massage treatment and attentive care rather than the oil.

Carver died on January 5, 1943, at the Tuskegee Institute after falling down the stairs of his home. He was 78 years old. He was buried next to Booker T. Washington on the Tuskegee Institute grounds.

Soon after Carver’s death, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation to create a monument to Carver, an honor previously only granted to presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The George Washington Carver National Monument now stands in Diamond, Missouri.

Carver was also posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990.

“Where there is no vision, there is no hope.”

“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.”

“When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.”