George Carver was born into slavery on a 240-acre farm near Diamond, Missouri shortly before the end of the Civil War. The farm was established as the George Washington Carver National Monument in 1943. The only previous national monuments honoring individuals were in memorium of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
George’s father was killed in a logging accident before he was born. George, his mother, and his sister were stolen from the farm and sold into Kentucky. Their white owner, Moses Carver, paid a neighbor to retrieve them, but he was able to find only George. Despite George being only an infant, the neighbor bought back the child by trading one of Moses’s best horses. Multiple accounts state that the former owners, Moses Carver and his wife, Sarah, raised George and his brother, James, as their own children. Supposedly, the family was anti-slavery but had slaves as they needed help on the farm. Both brothers were taught to read and write, but James quickly gave up his studies to work in the field with Moses. George was a sickly child, and a doctor had said he would not live to age 21. He helped Sarah with household chores, including the garden and learned about herbal remedies. He experimented on his own with fungicides, natural pesticides, and soil improvements. Despite his being a child, local farmers consulted him about plant, crop and garden issues.
He left home at age eleven to attend the Black school in Neosho. Mariah and Andrew Watkins, a childless Black family, took him in, in exchange for chores. Mariah was a midwife and nurse. George gained additional knowledge about herbal medicines from her. He also embraced religion. After approximately two years, he moved on. The domestic skills he learned from Sarah and Mariah would serve him well over the next decade as he used them to support himself while moving from town to town attending school. In 1880, he graduated from high school in Minneapolis, Kansas. He applied and was accepted at Highland College but was later rejected because of race. The Milhollands, a white family, convinced him to go to art school at Simpson College and work toward the goal of a teaching degree. At Simpson one of his professors convinced him to study botany. When he graduated from the Iowa State Agricultural School in 1894, he became the first Black American to earn a Bachelor of Science degree. He completed his Masters in Science in agriculture there in 1896.
There were several job offers, but the position offered by Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, appealed most to George. The “Washington” in Carver’s name is in honor of Booker T. Washington. Carver worked at Tuskegee until his death. His duties included teaching, research, supervising the school’s farms, making sure the toilets worked, and participating in committees.
Carver made many notable scientific discoveries and spread knowledge to better farmers’ lives and yields. Farmers were taught how to use natural resources to improve conditions, such as feeding hogs acorns instead of expensive commercial feed and using decomposed matter from swamps as a natural fertilizer. Crop rotation was his most important innovation in this line. He figured out which crops would give back to the soil what other crops, such as cotton, had depleted, thereby making the cotton crop better and yielding other crops.
Because of crop rotation, there was now a surplus of sweet potatoes and peanuts. While Carver did invent a wide variety of foods as well as inks, dyes and stains from sweet potatoes, his greatest success was with peanuts. He invented over 300 products using peanuts. He did not invent peanut butter, however. There was a large variety of food along with such things as paper, wood stains, and toiletries.
He was successful when he spoke before the Ways and Means Committee of the US House of Representatives, in 1921, to protect the American peanut industry by maintaining high tariffs.
He died after falling down a flight of stairs at the Tuskegee Institute in 1943 at the age of 78. After his death, the national monument was established (1943), and he was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (1990).
“There is no shortcut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation— veneer isn’t worth anything.” —George Washington Carver
By Joan Hampton-Porter, Curator, The History Museum on the Square
Photo: George Washington Carver 1906 Courtesy of the Library of Congress
