Agricultural scientist and inventor George Washington Carver was born in 1860 or 1861 or 1862 in Diamond Grove, Missouri. His exact birth date is unknown because he was born a slave on the farm of Moses and Susan Carver in Diamond, Missouri. The uncertainty about Carver’s birth is common, since the society that existed at that time, lacked any concern regarding slaves, whom they regarded as anything other than property. When George was only a few weeks old, Confederate raiders invaded the farm, kidnapping George, his mother, and his sister. They were sold in Kentucky, and only George was found by an agent of Moses Carver and returned to Diamond Grove, Missouri. He was traded back to his owners in exchange for a racehorse.
After slavery was abolished in 1866, George Carver and his brother Jim were raised by Moses and Susan Carver in post-emancipation Missouri. They encouraged George to continue his intellectual pursuits, and "Aunt Susan" taught him the basics of reading and writing. He was a frail, sickly child who, because of his poor health, spent much of his time assisting Susan Carver with domestic chores. George learned how to cook, mend, do laundry, embroider, and perform numerous similar tasks. George remained on the Carver plantation until he was about 10 or 12 years old. Black people were not allowed at the public schools, so when he was about 13, his master sent him to Neosho, Missouri for an early education, where there were greater educational resources for African American students.
When he reached the town, he met a kind woman, Mariah Watkins, from whom he wished to rent a room. When he identified himself as "Carver's George", as he had done his whole life, she replied that from now on his name was "George Carver". Because he wanted to attend the academy there, he moved to the home of another foster family, in Fort Scott, Kansas. After witnessing the killing of a Black man by a group of White people, Carver left the city. For the next few years, Carver wandered from town to town in Missouri and Kansas in search of a better education. He supported himself by taking in laundry and doing household chores. In his late 20s he managed to obtain a high-school education from Minneapolis High School, in Minneapolis, Kansas, in September 1880.
During his time spent in Minneapolis, there was another George Carver in town, which caused confusion over receiving mail. Carver chose a middle initial at random and began requesting letters to him be addressed to George W. Carver. Someone once asked if the "W" stood for Washington, and Carver grinned and said, "Why not?" However, he never used Washington as his middle name, and signed his name as either George W. Carver or simply George Carver. Carver was accepted into Highland College in 1885, but his admission was withdrawn when the college discovered he was Black. By the late 1880s his travels took him to Winterset, Iowa, where he worked as a farmhand for a local White couple, John and Helen Milholland, who had befriended him.
In early 1888, Carver obtained a $300 loan at the Bank of Ness City for education. The next year Carver was accepted into Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa where he became well respected for his artistic talent. Carver wanted to be an artist, a painter, and capture the beauty of nature that so fascinated him. It took only a few months for his art teacher, Etta Budd, to realize she had nothing else to teach him. Carver’s interests, however, lay more in science. At her urging, Carver transferred in 1891 to the Iowa State College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts in Ames, where her father was a professor of horticulture. She encouraged him to study botany. When he began there in 1891, he was the first Black student at Iowa State. Carver remained at Iowa State for five years and was the school’s, not just in his class but the whole school, only African American student.
He was an active participant in debating and agricultural societies, the Young Men’s Christian Association and the National Guard. He was the first trainer of the Iowa State football team. One of his paintings was selected to represent Iowa in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In 1894 he became the first Black person to graduate from Iowa State College, with a Bachelor of Science, where he studied botany and fungal diseases. Carver's bachelor's thesis for a degree in Agriculture was "Plants as Modified by Man", dated 1894. In 1895, Carver co-authored a series of papers on the prevention and cures for fungus diseases affecting cherry plants.
His professors were so impressed by his work on the fungal infections common to soybean plants that he was asked to remain as part of the faculty to work on his master’s degree. George Carver earned his Master of Science in bacterial botany and agriculture in 1896. Working as director of the Iowa State Experimental Station, Carver discovered two types of fungi, which were subsequently named for him. Carver also began experiments in crop rotation, using soy plantings to replace nitrogen in depleted soil. Before long, Carver became well known as a leading agricultural scientist. Carver received his Master of Science degree in 1896, and upon graduation he was bombarded with offers to teach. Despite occasionally being addressed as "doctor", Carver never received an official doctorate.
In April 1896, Carver received a letter from Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute, one of the first Black colleges in the United States.
“I cannot offer you money, position, or fame,” read this letter. “The first two you have. The last from the position you now occupy you will no doubt achieve. These things I now ask you to give up. I offer you in their place: work – hard work, the task of bringing people from degradation, poverty, and waste to full manhood. Your department exists only on paper and your laboratory will have to be in your head.”
Washington was determined to make the Tuskegee Institute the leading Black educational institution in the South. To recruit Carver to Tuskegee, Washington gave him an above average salary and two rooms for his personal use, although both concessions were resented by some other faculty. He wanted to establish an agriculture department. There were five million Black farmers in the South. Most lived in poverty and ignorance of scientific agriculture. But to establish such a department, Washington knew he needed a Black man with an advanced degree in agriculture. And in all the country there was only one such man: George Washington Carver. Carver left Iowa for Alabama in the fall of 1896 to lead the Agriculture Department at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute.
Carver had never been in the Deep South or any of the old Confederate states. Almost everything about Alabama’s system of agriculture was new to him. Carver’s classrooms at Tuskegee were non-existent. In order to establish some sort of laboratory, he had to root through junk heaps to find usable bottles and other items. The problems confronting him were enormous and the workload Washington assigned him was crushing. At Tuskegee, Washington was trying to improve the lot of African Americans through education and the acquisition of useful skills rather than through political agitation. The worldwide demand for cotton had enriched the South before the Civil War. In his annual Bulletins, he argued that Alabaman Black farmers needed to wean themselves from cotton.
The process of growing cotton, depleted the soil. While a professor at Tuskegee Institute, Carver developed techniques to improve soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton. Together with other agricultural experts, he urged farmers to restore nitrogen to their soils by practicing systematic crop rotation: alternating cotton crops with plantings of sweet potatoes or legumes, such as peanuts, soybeans and cow peas. These crops both restored nitrogen to the soil and were good for human consumption. Following the crop rotation practice resulted in improved cotton yields and gave farmers alternative cash crops. To train farmers to successfully rotate and cultivate the new crops, Carver developed an agricultural extension program for Alabama that was similar to the one at Iowa State.
George Carver founded an industrial research laboratory, where he and assistants worked to popularize the new crops by developing hundreds of applications for them. They did original research as well as promoting applications and recipes, which they collected from others. Carver wanted poor farmers to grow other crops, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, as a source of their own food and to improve their quality of life. The most popular of his 44 practical bulletins for farmers contained 105 food recipes using peanuts. When Carver arrived at Tuskegee in 1896, the peanut had not even been recognized as a crop, but within the next half century it became one of the six leading crops throughout the United States and, in the South.
Carver did not stop with these discoveries. From the inexpensive pecan he developed more than 75 products, from discarded corn stalks dozens of uses and from common clays he created dyes and paints. In 1914, at a time when the boll weevil had almost ruined cotton growers, Carver revealed his experiments to the public, and increasing numbers of the South’s farmers began to turn to peanuts, sweet potatoes, and their derivatives for income. Carver’s research with peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other foodstuffs gained him regional notoriety. After 20 years at Tuskegee, George Carver was known and respected throughout the South and among agriculturalists in other areas of the country. President Theodore Roosevelt publicly admired his work.
Following the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915, however, Carver quickly rose to international fame and he became widely known for his experiments. In 1916, Carver was made a member of the Royal Society of Arts in England, one of only a handful of Americans at that time to receive this honor. He was also enlisted by White liberals to serve in the cause of improving race relations. Thomas Edison, the great inventor was so enthusiastic about that he asked Carver to move to Orange Grove, New Jersey to work at the Edison Laboratories. He declined the generous offer, wanting to continue on at Tuskegee. He was credited with making significant efforts to help the South escape its reliance upon the single crop of cotton and with supplementing the meager diets of poor southerners.
National attention came in the wake of his testimony in support of a peanut tariff before the House Ways and Means Committee of Congress in 1921. He testified on behalf of the United Peanut Growers’ Association. Due to segregation, it was highly unusual for an African American to appear as an expert witness. After his appearance, peanuts and Carver were intertwined in the public's mind. Although he spent years developing and promoting numerous products made from peanuts, none became commercially successful. Apart from his work to improve the lives of farmers, Carver was also a leader in promoting environmentalism. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he traveled across the South speaking to groups of White youths in an effort to promote racial harmony.
During the mid-1930s more attention was drawn to Carver when he began to offer treatment of peanut-oil massages to victims of infantile paralysis. Word of Carver’s treatment spread, and the Tuskegee campus became a Lourdes-like sanctuary for people seeking relief from the effects of polio. Unfortunately, despite the improvements that Carver witnessed and reported, there was never any scientific evidence that peanut oil actually helped polio victims recover. Instead, the patients may have benefited from the massage treatment itself, as well as the attentive care that Carver provided. Carver and automaker Henry Ford quickly struck up a friendship after meeting in 1937. Carver would stop by Ford's laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan, and Ford himself visited Tuskegee in Alabama.
In an era of high racial polarization, his fame reached beyond the Black community. He was widely recognized and praised in the White community for his many achievements and talents. In 1941, Time magazine dubbed Carver a "Black Leonardo". He became the first Black man to be elected a fellow in Britain’s Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. He was the most prominent Black scientist of the early 20th century. In the last two decades of his life, Carver lived as a minor celebrity but his focus was always on helping people. Barely six months after Carver’s death of 1943, Congress passed legislation creating the George Washington Carver National Monument on the farm where he was born near Diamond, Missouri. This was the first national monument dedicated to an African American and the first to honor someone other than a president.