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What was George Washington Carver’s childhood like?

How did george washington carver change the world.

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George Washington Carver

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Who was George Washington Carver?

George Washington Carver was an American agricultural chemist, agronomist, and experimenter whose development of new products derived from  peanuts  (groundnuts),  sweet potatoes , and  soybeans  helped revolutionize the agricultural economy of  the South .

George Washington Carver was born into slavery, the son of an enslaved woman named Mary, owned by Moses Carver. During the  American Civil War , George and Mary were kidnapped and taken away to be sold. Moses Carver located George but not Mary, and George lived on the Carver property until about age 10 or 12.

How was George Washington Carver educated?

In his late 20s George Washington Carver obtained a high-school education in Kansas while working as a farmhand. He received a bachelor’s degree in  agricultural science  (1894) and a master of science degree (1896) from Iowa State Agricultural College (later  Iowa State University ).

George Washington Carver’s work, which began for the sake of poor Black sharecroppers , led to a better life for the entire South by liberating it from its environmentally destructive dependence on cotton . His efforts brought about a significant advance in agricultural training in an era when agriculture was the largest single occupation of Americans.

George Washington Carver (born 1861?, near Diamond Grove , Missouri , U.S.—died January 5, 1943, Tuskegee , Alabama) was a revolutionary American agricultural chemist, agronomist , and experimenter who was born into slavery and sought to uplift Black farmers through the development of new products derived from peanuts , sweet potatoes , and soybeans . His work helped transform the stagnant agricultural economy of the South after the American Civil War . For most of his career he taught and conducted research at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University ) in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Carver was the son of an enslaved woman named Mary, who was owned by Moses Carver; his father was killed in an accident before he was born. Of his early life, Carver wrote, “I was born in Diamond Grove, Missouri, about the close of the great Civil War, in a little one-roomed log shanty, on the home of Mr. Moses Carver, a German by birth and the owner of my mother, my father being the property of Mr. Grant, who owned the adjoining plantation.” During the turbulence of the Civil War, the Carver farm was raided, and infant George and his mother were kidnapped and taken to Arkansas to be sold. Moses Carver was eventually able to track down young George but was unable to find Mary. Frail and sick, the orphaned child was returned to the Carver plantation and nursed back to health.

With the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, George was no longer enslaved. He remained with the Carvers until he was about 10 or 12 years old, when he left to acquire an education. He traveled 8 miles (13 km) to the county seat of Neosho , Missouri, where he found room and board with Mariah and Andrew Watkins, an African American couple. He briefly attended a school for Black children but quickly moved beyond the basic literacy offered by the schoolmaster, who himself had a limited education. Carver then spent some time wandering about, working with his hands and developing his keen interest in plants and animals. Both Susan Carver—the wife of his former owner—and Mariah Watkins had taught him about gardening and medicinal herbs, and he continued to grow his botanical knowledge. He also learned to draw, and later in life he devoted considerable time to painting flowers, plants, and landscapes.

By both books—including Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book , which he learned nearly by heart—and experience, young George acquired a fragmentary education while doing whatever work came to hand in order to subsist. He supported himself by varied occupations that included general household worker, hotel cook, laundryman, farm laborer, and homesteader. In his late 20s he obtained a high-school education in Minneapolis, Kansas , while working as a farmhand. He applied and was accepted to Highland College in Kansas, but, when he appeared in person to register, the school refused to admit him because he was Black. Pained by that rejection, he continued to travel the country and eventually landed in Iowa, where he met the white Milhollands sometime in the late 1800s. The couple befriended him and urged Carver to enroll in nearby Simpson College in Indianola ; he would later credit them for his continued pursuit of higher education . Carver studied piano and art at Simpson before transferring to Iowa State Agricultural College (later Iowa State University ), where he received a bachelor’s degree in agricultural science in 1894 and a Master of Science degree in 1896.

Carver left Iowa for Alabama in the fall of 1896 to direct the newly organized department of agriculture at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute , a school headed by noted African American educator Booker T. Washington . Given that Carver was the only African American in the United States with a graduate degree in agricultural science , Washington aggressively pursued him for the all-Black faculty of the school. In accepting the position, Carver wrote:

It has always been the one great ideal of my life to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of ‘my people’ possible and to this end I have been preparing myself these many years; feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people.

Indeed, at Tuskegee, Washington sought to improve the lot of African Americans through education and the acquisition of useful skills rather than through political agitation, and he stressed conciliation and compromise. Carver complemented those aims in his desire to help Black farmers rise above sharecropping and saw economic development as a path for Black advancement in American society. Despite many offers elsewhere, Carver remained at Tuskegee for the rest of his life.

After becoming the institute’s director of agricultural research in 1896, Carver devoted his time to research projects aimed at helping Southern agriculture, demonstrating ways in which farmers could improve their economic situation. He conducted experiments in soil management and crop production and directed an experimental farm. At this time, agriculture in the Deep South was in steep decline because the unremitting single-crop cultivation of cotton had left the soil of many fields exhausted and worthless, and erosion had then taken its toll on areas that could no longer sustain any plant cover. As a remedy, Carver urged Southern farmers to plant peanuts ( Arachis hypogaea ) and soybeans ( Glycine max ). As members of the legume family ( Fabaceae ), these plants could restore nitrogen to the soil while also providing the protein so badly needed in the diet of many Southerners.

Carver found that Alabama’s soils were particularly well suited to growing peanuts and sweet potatoes ( Ipomoea batatas ), but, when the state’s farmers began cultivating these crops instead of cotton, they found little demand for them on the market. In response to this problem, Carver set about enlarging the commercial possibilities of the peanut and sweet potato through a long and ingenious program of laboratory research. He ultimately developed 300 derivative products from peanuts—among them milk, flour , ink , dyes , plastics , wood stains, soap , linoleum , medicinal oils, and cosmetics —and 118 from sweet potatoes, including flour, vinegar , molasses , ink, a synthetic rubber , and postage stamp glue. In helping farmers, particularly Black sharecroppers, find a market for their crops and increase the productivity of their farms by protecting and regenerating the soil, Carver hoped to bring them closer to financial security and liberation.

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. Much exhausted land was renewed, and the South became a major new supplier of agricultural products. 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, the second cash crop (after cotton) by 1940. In 1942 the U.S. government allotted 2,023,428 hectares (5,000,000 acres) of peanuts to farmers. Carver’s efforts had finally helped liberate the South from its excessive dependence on cotton.

Among Carver’s many honors were his election to Britain’s Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (London) in 1916 and his receipt of the Spingarn Medal in 1923. Late in his career he declined an invitation to work for Thomas Edison at a salary of more than $100,000 a year. U.S. Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt visited him, and his friends included Henry Ford and Mahatma Gandhi . Foreign governments requested his counsel on agricultural matters: Joseph Stalin , for example, in 1931 invited him to manage cotton plantations in southern Russia and to make a tour of the Soviet Union , but Carver refused.

In 1940 Carver donated his life savings to the establishment of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee for continuing research in agriculture. During World War II he worked to replace the textile dyes formerly imported from Europe, and in all he produced dyes of 500 shades.

Many scientists thought of Carver more as a concoctionist than as a contributor to scientific knowledge. Many of his fellow African Americans were critical of what they regarded as his subservience. Certainly, this small, mild, soft-spoken, innately modest man, eccentric in dress and mannerism, seemed unbelievably heedless of the conventional pleasures and rewards of this life. But these qualities endeared Carver to many whites, who were almost invariably charmed by his humble demeanor and his quiet work in self-imposed segregation at Tuskegee. As a result of his accommodation to the mores of the South, many whites came to regard him with a sort of patronizing adulation .

Carver thus, for much of white America, increasingly came to stand as a kind of saintly and comfortable symbol of the intellectual achievements of African Americans. Carver was evidently uninterested in the role his image played in the racial politics of the time. His great desire in later life was simply to serve humanity, and his work, which began for the sake of the poorest of the Black sharecroppers , paved the way for a better life for the entire South. On the importance of leaving a legacy , he famously quipped, “No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.” His efforts brought about a significant advance in agricultural training in an era when agriculture was the largest single occupation of Americans, and he extended Tuskegee’s influence throughout the South by encouraging improved farm methods, crop diversification, and soil conservation.

• Scientific Biographies

George Washington Carver

Known to many as the Peanut Man, Carver developed new products from underappreciated Southern agricultural crops and taught poor farmers how to improve soil productivity.

In the post–Civil War South, one man made it his mission to use agricultural chemistry and scientific methodology to improve the lives of impoverished farmers.

George Washington Carver (ca. 1864–1943) was born enslaved in Missouri at the time of the Civil War. His exact birth date and year are unknown, and reported dates range between 1860 and 1865. He was orphaned as an infant, and, with the war bringing an end to slavery, he grew up a free child, albeit on the farm of his mother’s former master, Moses Carver. The Carvers raised George and gave him their surname. Early on he developed a keen interest in plants, collecting specimens in the woods on the farm.

At age 11, Carver left home to pursue an education in the nearby town of Neosho. He was taken in by an African American couple, Mariah and Andrew Watkins, for whom he did odd jobs while attending school for the first time. Disappointed in the school in Neosho, Carver eventually left for Kansas, where for several years he supported himself through a variety of occupations and added to his education in a piecemeal fashion.

He eventually earned a high school diploma in his twenties, but he soon found that opportunities to attend college for young black men in Kansas were nonexistent. So in the late 1880s Carver relocated again, this time to Iowa, where he met the Milhollands, a white couple who encouraged him to enroll in college.

Carver briefly attended Simpson College in Indianola, studying music and art. When a teacher there learned of his interest in botany, she encouraged him to transfer to Iowa State Agricultural College (now Iowa State University), dissuading him from his original dream of becoming an artist. Carver earned his bachelor’s degree in agricultural science from Iowa State in 1894 and a master’s in 1896. While there he demonstrated a talent for identifying and treating plant diseases.

Around this time Booker T. Washington was looking to establish an agricultural department and research facility at his Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. Washington, the leading black statesman of the day, and two others had founded the institute in 1881 as a new vocational school for African Americans, and the institute had steadily grown.

As Carver was the only African American in the nation with an advanced degree in scientific agriculture, Washington sought him out. Carver joined the faculty of Tuskegee in 1896 and stayed there the rest of his life. He was both a teacher and a prolific researcher, heading up the institute’s Agricultural Experiment Station.

Crop Rotation

Carver’s primary interest was in using chemistry and scientific methodology to improve the lives of impoverished farmers in southeastern Alabama. To that end he conducted soil studies to determine what crops would grow best in the region and found that the local soil was perfect for growing peanuts and sweet potatoes. He also taught farmers about fertilization and crop rotation as methods for increasing soil productivity. The primary crop in the South was cotton, which severely depleted soil nutrients, but by rotating crops—alternating cotton with soil-enriching crops like legumes and sweet potatoes—farmers could ultimately increase their cotton yield for a plot of land. And crop rotation was cheaper than commercial fertilization. But what to do with all the sweet potatoes and peanuts? At the time, not many people ate them, and there weren’t many other uses for these crops.

New Uses for “Undesirable” Crops

Carver went to work to invent new food, industrial, and commercial products—including flour, sugar, vinegar, cosmetic products, paint, and ink—from these “lowly” plants. From peanuts alone he developed hundreds of new products, thus creating a market for this inexpensive, soil-enriching legume. In 1921 Carver famously spoke before the House Ways and Means Committee on behalf of the nascent peanut industry to secure tariff protection and was thereafter known as the Peanut Man.

When he first arrived at Tuskegee in 1896, the peanut was not even a recognized U.S. crop; by 1940 it had become one of the six leading crops in the nation and the second cash crop in the South (after cotton). Both peanuts and sweet potatoes were slowly incorporated into Southern cooking, and today the peanut especially is ubiquitous in the American diet.

Carver also developed traveling schools and other outreach programs to educate farmers. He published popular bulletins, distributed to farmers for free, that reported on his research at the Agricultural Experiment Station and its applications.

Recognition

Through chemistry and conviction Carver revolutionized Southern agriculture and raised the standard of living of his fellow man. In addition to the popular honor of being one of the most recognized names in African American history, Carver received the 1923 Spingarn Medal and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The George Washington Carver National Monument was the first national monument dedicated to a black American and the first to a nonpresident.

Featured image: George Washington Carver, Tuskegee Institute, 1906. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-J601-302/Frances Benjamin Johnston.

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George Washington Carver

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 24, 2023 | Original: October 27, 2009

George Washington Carver was an agricultural scientist and inventor who developed hundreds of products using peanuts (though not peanut butter, as is often claimed), sweet potatoes and soybeans. Born into slavery before it was outlawed, Carver left home at a young age to pursue education and would eventually earn a master’s degree in agricultural science from Iowa State University. He would go on to teach and conduct research at Tuskegee University for decades, and soon after his death his childhood home would be named a national monument—the first of its kind to honor a Black American.

Born on a farm near Diamond, Missouri , the exact date of Carver’s birth is unknown, but it’s thought he was born in January or June of 1864.

Nine years prior, Moses Carver, a white farm owner, purchased George Carver’s mother Mary when she was 13 years old. The elder Carver reportedly was against slavery , but needed help with his 240-acre farm.

When Carver 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 Carver hired a neighbor to retrieve them, but the neighbor only succeeded in finding George, whom he purchased by trading one of Moses’ finest horses. Carver grew up knowing little about his mother or his father, who had died in an accident before he was born.

Moses Carver and his wife Susan raised the young George and his brother James as their own and taught the boys how to read and write.

James gave up his studies and focused on working the fields with Moses. George, however, 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, Carver 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.

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 on Carver her broad knowledge of medicinal herbs and her devout faith.

Disappointed with the education he received at the Neosho school, Carver moved to Kansas about two years later, joining numerous other Blacks who were traveling west.

For the next decade or so, Carver 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 a higher education. Despite his former setback, 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.

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Carver Makes Black History

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.

Carver 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 would work at Tuskegee Institute for the rest of his life.

Tuskegee Institute

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. Additionally, many faculty members resented Carver for his high salary and demand to have 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 for ways 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 would butt heads often, in part because Carver wanted little to do with teaching (though he was beloved by his students). Carver would eventually get his way when Washington died in 1915 and was succeeded by Robert Russa Moton, who relieved Carver of his teaching duties except for summer school.

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What Did George Washington Carver Invent?

By this time, Carver already had great successes in the laboratory and the community. He 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.

Through his work on soil chemistry, Carver learned that years of growing cotton had depleted the nutrients from 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.

To further help farmers, he invented the Jessup wagon, a kind of mobile (horse-drawn) classroom and laboratory used to demonstrate soil chemistry.

Carver: The Peanut Man

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. For example, he 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 Carver’s biggest success 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, however, 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. Though 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.”

Fame and Legacy

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 .

Up until the year of his death, he also released bulletins for the public (44 bulletins between 1898 and 1943). Some of the bulletins reported on research findings but many others were more practical in nature and included cultivation information for farmers, science for teachers and recipes for housewives.

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

Soon after, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation for Carver to receive his own monument, 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.

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

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

George Washington Carver; American Chemical Society . George W. Carver (1865? – 1943); The State Historical Society of Missouri . George Washington Carver; Science History Museum . George Washington Carver, The Black History Monthiest Of Them All; NPR . George Washington Carver And The Peanut; American Heritage .

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George Washington Carver: Biography, Inventions & Quotes

George Washington Carver was a prominent American scientist and inventor in the early 1900s. Carver developed hundreds of products using the peanut, sweet potatoes and soybeans. He also was a champion of crop rotation and agricultural education. Born into slavery, today he is an icon of American ingenuity and the transformative potential of education.

Carver was likely born in January or June of 1864. His exact birth date is unknown because he was born a slave on the farm of Moses Carver in Diamond, Missouri. Very little is known about George’s father, who may have been a field hand named Giles who was killed in a farming accident before George was born. George’s mother was named Mary; he had several sisters, and a brother named James.

When George was only a few weeks old, Confederate raiders invaded the farm, kidnapping George, his mother and sister. They were sold in Kentucky, and only George was found by an agent of Moses Carver and returned to Missouri. Carver and his wife, Susan, raised George and James and taught them to read.

James soon gave up the lessons, preferring to work in the fields with his foster father. George was not a strong child and was not able to work in the fields, so Susan taught the boy to help her in the kitchen garden and to make simple herbal medicines. George became fascinated by plants and was soon experimenting with natural pesticides, fungicides and soil conditioners. Local farmers began to call George “the plant doctor,” as he was able to tell them how to improve the health of their garden plants.

At his wife’s insistence, Moses found a school that would accept George as a student.  George walked the 10 miles several times a week to attend the School for African American Children in Neosho, Kan. When he was about 13 years old, he left the farm to move to Ft. Scott, Kan., but he later moved to Minneapolis, Kan., to attend high school. He earned much of his tuition by working in the kitchen of a local hotel. He concocted new recipes, which he entered in local baking contests. He graduated from Minneapolis High School in 1880 and set his sights on college.

College years

George first applied to Highland Presbyterian College in Kansas. The college was impressed by George’s application essay and granted him a full scholarship. When he arrived at the school, however, he was turned away — they hadn’t realized he was black. Over the next few years, George worked at a variety of jobs. He homesteaded a farm in Kansas, worked a ranch in New Mexico, and worked for the railroads, always saving money and looking for a college that would accept him.

In 1888, George enrolled as the first black student at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. He began studying art and piano, expecting to earn a teaching degree. Carver later said, “The kind of people at Simpson College made me believe I was a human being.”  Recognizing the unusual attention to detail in his paintings of plants and flowers his instructor, Etta Budd, encouraged him to apply to Iowa State Agricultural School (now Iowa State University) to study Botany.

At Iowa State, Carver was the first African American student to earn his Bachelor of Science in 1894. 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 (awarded 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.

Tuskegee Institute

In April 1896, Carver received a letter from Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute, one of the first African American 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’s offer was $125.00 per month (a substantial cut from Carver’s Iowa State salary) and the luxury of two rooms for living quarters (most Tuskegee faculty members had just one). It was an offer that George Carver accepted immediately and the place where he worked for the remainder of his life.

Carver was determined to use his knowledge to help poor farmers of the rural South. He began by introducing the idea of crop rotation. In the Tuskegee experimental fields, Carver settled on peanuts because it was a simple crop to grow and had excellent nitrogen fixating properties to improve soil depleted by growing cotton. He took his lessons to former slaves turned sharecroppers by inventing the Jessup Wagon, a horse-drawn classroom and laboratory for demonstrating soil chemistry. Farmers were ecstatic with the large cotton crops resulting from the cotton/peanut rotation, but were less enthusiastic about the huge surplus of peanuts that built up and began to rot in local storehouses.

Peanut products

Carver heard the complaints and retired to his laboratory for a solid week, during which he developed several new products that could be produced from peanuts. When he introduced these products to the public in a series of simple brochures, the market for peanuts skyrocketed. Today, Carver is credited with saving the agricultural economy of the rural South.

From his work at Tuskegee, Carver developed approximately 300 products made from peanuts; these included: flour, paste, insulation, paper, wall board, wood stains, soap, shaving cream and skin lotion. He experimented with medicines made from peanuts, which included antiseptics, laxatives and a treatment for goiter.

What about peanut butter?

Contrary to popular belief, while Carver developed a version of peanut butter, he did not invent it. The Incas developed a paste made out of ground peanuts as far back as 950 B.C. In the United States, according to the National Peanut Board , Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of cereal fame, invented a version of peanut butter in 1895.

A St. Louis physician may have developed peanut butter as a protein substitute for people who had poor teeth and couldn't chew meat. Peanut butter was introduced at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904.

Aiding the war effort

During World War I, Carver was asked to assist Henry Ford in producing a peanut-based replacement for rubber. Also during the war, when dyes from Europe became difficult to obtain, he helped the American textile industry by developing more than 30 colors of dye from Alabama soils.

After the War, George added a "W" to his name to honor Booker T. Washington. Carver continued to experiment with peanut products and became interested in sweet potatoes, another nitrogen-fixing crop. Products he invented using sweet potatoes include: wood fillers, more than 73 dyes, rope, breakfast cereal, synthetic silk, shoe polish and molasses. He wrote several brochures on the nutritional value of sweet potatoes and the protein found in peanuts, including recipes he invented for use of his favorite plants. He even went to India to confer with Mahatma Gandhi on nutrition in developing nations.

In 1920, Carver delivered a speech to the new Peanut Growers Association of America. This organization was advocating that Congress pass a tariff law to protect the new American industry from imported crops. As a result of this speech, he testified before Congress in 1921 and the tariff was passed in 1922.  In 1923, Carver was named as Speaker for the United States Commission on Interracial Cooperation, a post he held until 1933. In 1935, he was named head of the Division of Plant Mycology and Disease Survey for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. By 1938, largely due to Carver’s influence, peanuts had grown to be a $200-million-per-year crop in the United States and were the chief agricultural product grown in the state of Alabama.

Carver's legacy

Carver died on Jan. 5, 1943. At his death, he left his life savings, more than $60,000, to found the George Washington Carver Institute for Agriculture at Tuskegee. In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated funds to erect a monument at Diamond, Missouri, in his honor.

Commemorative postage stamps were issued in 1948 and again in 1998. A George Washington Carver half-dollar coin was minted between 1951 and 1954. There are two U.S. military vessels named in his honor.

There are also numerous scholarships and schools named for him. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Simpson College. Since his exact birth date is unknown, Congress has designated January 5 as George Washington Carver Recognition Day.

Carver only patented three of his inventions. In his words, “It is not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.” 

Carver quotes

"Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses."

"Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater."

"Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom."

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

"Where there is no vision, there is no hope."

"Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise."

"There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation - veneer isn't worth anything."

"Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable."  

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George Washington Carver

• Occupation: Scientist and educator
• Born: January 1864 in Diamond Grove, Missouri
• Died: January 5, 1943 in Tuskegee, Alabama
• Best known for: Discovering many ways to use the peanut

• Growing up George had been known as Carver's George. When he started school he went by George Carver. He later added the W in the middle telling his friends it stood for Washington.
• People in the south at the time called peanuts "goobers".
• Carver would sometimes take his classes out to the farms and teach farmers directly what they could do to improve their crops.
• His nickname later in life was the "Wizard of Tuskegee".
• He wrote up a pamphlet called "Help for Hard Times" that instructed farmers on what they could do to improve their crops.
• It takes over 500 peanuts to make one 12-ounce jar of peanut butter.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

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George Washington Carver’s Powerful Circle of Friends

Booker T. Washington helped launch Carver’s career

Carver was a professor and recent graduate student at what is now Iowa State University when he first came to Booker T. Washington 's attention in 1896. Born into slavery as Carver had been, Washington was the most famous Black man in America and had founded the all-Black Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama some 15 years earlier. He lured Carver to Alabama to head up Tuskegee’s recently-created agricultural department, where Carver would spend the next four decades.

Washington came into conflict with other Black leaders, particularly W.E.B. Du Bois , for his conservative, pragmatic approach to civil rights issues, advocating that African Americans should focus on gaining vocational skills to increase their prosperity, even if it meant accepting racial segregation, discrimination and a lack of traditional academic achievement.

Carver aligned himself with Washington’s thinking, but this didn’t prevent the two from clashing. Although his salary was double that of some other Tuskegee staffers, Carver balked at handling many of his day-to-day teaching and administrative responsibilities.

The two were temperamental opposites: Washington, a fastidious, buttoned-up, organized “doer,” and Carver, a messy, haphazardly-dressed dreamer, perpetually absorbed by his endless research experiments. Despite these differences, Washington recognized Carver’s brilliance and steadfastly supported him over the objections of others. Carver was reportedly devastated by Washington’s death in 1915.

Carver became an advisor to presidents and the U.S. government

Carver first came to the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt thanks to his association with Washington, who was an advisor to Roosevelt on race relations and once dined at the White House as Roosevelt’s guest. Roosevelt first visited Tuskegee in 1905, and Carver was tasked with mounting a presentation showcasing the Institute’s work.

Carver continued to advise Roosevelt after Washington’s death, and until Roosevelt’s own death in 1919. During his time as vice president, Calvin Coolidge also visited Tuskegee to seek Carver’s agricultural advice.

Carver’s public profile began to rise in the 1920s, thanks to his pioneering work with peanuts. He appeared before the U.S. Congress in 1921 on behalf of a peanut farmer’s lobbying group, where he impressed lawmakers with his knowledge and expertise at a time when racist attitudes were the norm and the Ku Klux Klan was re-emerging as a brutal tool of repression.

Increasingly known as the “peanut man,” Carver became a source of advice for fellow scientists and government officials alike.

Carver’s influence grew during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt , thanks in part to an old connection. Carver had met the family of FDR’s first Secretary of Agriculture (and future Vice President) Henry A. Wallace in the 1890s, while he was still a student at Iowa State University. Wallace credited Carver with inspiring his lifelong passion for plants and botany.

The devastation wrought by the storms that ravaged the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression made Carver’s insightful work into soil conservation and crop rotation crucial. Although he and Wallace would later clash over agricultural practices, he remained a well-regarded expert in the field.

Carver also endeared himself to FDR because of his research into the use of peanut oil-based massages as a treatment for polio. Roosevelt reportedly used Carver’s massage technique, although later research debunked its efficacy.

When Carver died, Roosevelt signed legislation establishing the George Washington Carver National Monument in Missouri, the first non-presidential national monument and the first to honor an African American.

He developed a close bond with Henry Ford

It’s perhaps unsurprising that these two lifelong innovators were drawn to each other.

Henry Ford first sought out Carver’s advice in the 1920s, beginning a friendship that lasted until Carver’s death in 1943. Ford was deeply interested in developing alternative energy sources to gasoline and was fascinated by Carver’s work with soybeans and peanuts.

The two exchanged visits at Tuskegee and Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan, plants, where they worked together on a series of initiatives.

During World War II, the U.S. government asked the pair to develop a soybean-based alternative to rubber during an era of wartime rationing. After weeks of experiments in Michigan in July 1942, Carver and Ford produced a successful replacement using goldenrod.

That same year, inspired by collaborations with Carver, Ford demonstrated a newly-designed car with a lightweight body comprised in part from soybeans. Ford also became a key financial backer of the Tuskegee Institute, underwriting many of Carver’s initiatives, and even installing an elevator in Carver’s house to help his increasingly infirm friend move around his Alabama home.

Ford’s fellow inventor Thomas Edison was also a fan of Carver. Although Carver later embellished the financial details of the story to reporters, in 1916, Edison unsuccessfully tried to lure Carver away from Tuskegee to become a researcher in Edison’s famed New Jersey laboratory.

Carver even gave Gandhi nutritional advice

Perhaps one of Carver’s most unlikely friendships was with the man Carver affectionately called “My beloved friend, Mr. Gandhi .” Their correspondence began in 1929 when Mahatma Gandhi was in his early years as leader of the Indian independence movement.

A long-time vegetarian, Gandhi knew that his fight would be a long and arduous one, which could easily sap his emotional and physical strength. He reached out to Carver for nutritional advice, and the two struck up a friendship that lasted until at least 1935, with Carver preaching the benefits of adding soy to Gandhi’s diet.

Carver even traveled to India to advise Gandhi on how to implement his nutritional theories into practice in India and other developing nations.

Gandhi wasn’t the only foreign leader to seek Carver’s help. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin , whose brutal agrarian reforms resulted in a famine that killed millions, asked Carver to visit the Soviet Union in the 1930s to reorganize a series of cotton plantations. Carver, however, refused Stalin’s invitation, most likely because of his unwillingness to leave his beloved Tuskegee University.

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