Personal life
Christianity
George Washington incorporated science and faith into his life because he thought it was possible to have both. He often declared that the only way he could successfully pursue and carry out the art of science was through his trust in Jesus. As he wrote of his conversion in 1931, George Washington was a little lad when he became a Christian:
I was just a mere boy when converted, hardly ten years old. There isn’t much of a story to it. God just came into my heart one afternoon while I was alone in the ‘loft’ of our big barn while I was shelling corn to carry to the mill to be ground into meal.
A dear little white boy, one of our neighbors, about my age came by one Saturday morning, and in talking and playing he told me he was going to Sunday school tomorrow morning. I was eager to know what a Sunday school was. He said they sang hymns and prayed. I asked him what prayer was and what they said. I do not remember what he said; only remember that as soon as he left I climbed up into the ‘loft,’ knelt down by the barrel of corn and prayed as best I could. I do not remember what I said. I only recall that I felt so good that I prayed several times before I quit.
My brother and myself were the only colored children in that neighborhood and of course, we could not go to church or Sunday school, or school of any kind.
That was my simple conversion, and I have tried to keep the faith.
— G. W. Carver; Letter to Isabelle Coleman; July 24, 1931
Because to his deteriorating condition, it was anticipated that he would not live past the age of 21. His faith grew stronger as a result of living well past the age of 21. He consistently made acquaintances with other Christians during his career. He relied on them in particular when his study approach was attacked by the public and scholarly community.
George Washington viewed faith in Jesus Christ as a means of destroying both barriers of racial disharmony and social stratification. He cared about his students’ character development just as much as their intellectual growth. He enumerated “eight cardinal virtues” that characterize “a lady or a gentleman”:
- Be clean both inside and out.
- Who neither looks up to the rich nor down on the poor.
- Who loses, if needs be, without squealing.
- Who wins without bragging.
- Who is always considerate of women, children and old people.
- Who is too brave to lie.
- Who is too generous to cheat.
- Who take his share of the world and lets other people have theirs.
George Washington started teaching a Sunday Bible lesson at Tuskegee in 1906 at the request of numerous students. He acted out stories on a daily basis.
Voice Pitch
George Washington had a high-pitched voice even as an adult. He “was a frail and sickly child” with “frequent bouts of what was called croup and a severe case of whooping cough,” according to historian Linda O. McMurry. McMurry disputed the croup diagnosis, arguing that “his stunted growth and apparently impaired vocal cords suggest instead tubercular or pneumococcal infection.” His high-pitched voice astonished everyone he met until his death, and he frequently experienced chest congestion and voice loss. Frequent infections of that kind could have led to the development of polyps on the larynx and may have resulted from a gamma globulin deficit.”
Honors
- The NAACP’s 1923 Spingarn Medal is given out every year for exceptional accomplishment.
- 1928, Simpson College honorary doctorate
- The Roosevelt Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Southern Agriculture, awarded in 1939
- Carver founded the George Washington Carver Foundation at the Tuskegee Institute in 1940.
- The Tuskegee Institute dedicated the George Washington Carver Museum in 1941.
- As an homage, Ford constructed a duplicate of Carver’s birth hut at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn in 1942.
- Ford named a laboratory in Dearborn after Carver in 1942.
- 1943 saw the launch of the Liberty ship SS George Washington Carver.
- In 1947, the Chicago Public Schools established George Washington Carver Area High School in his honor in the Riverdale/Far South Side neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, USA.
- George Washington Carver State Park was named in 1950. From 1951 to 1954, the U.S. Mint commemorated Carver with a 50-cent silver piece.
- The USS George Washington Carver (SSBN-656), a ballistic missile submarine, was launched in 1965.
- In 1969, Iowa State University built Carver Hall as a memorial to Carver, a former student.
- The US Congress declared January 5, the anniversary of his passing, to be George Washington Carver Recognition Day in 1943.
- In 1999, USDA designated a section of its site in Beltsville, Maryland, as the George Washington Carver Center.
- 2002 Iowa Award, the highest citizen honor in the state.
- George Washington Carver Bridge, Des Moines, Iowa, 2004
- 2007 saw the creation of a garden section at the Missouri Botanical Gardens named in his honor, complete with a memorial statue and information about his contributions.
- In 2022, Governor Kim Reynolds signed a law designating February 1st as George Washington Carver Day in Iowa.
- In his honor, Willowbrook Neighborhood Park in Willowbrook, California was renamed George Washington Carver Park.
- The George Washington Carver Elementary School of the Compton Unified School District in Los Angeles County, California; the George Washington Carver School of Arts and Science of the Sacramento City Unified School District in Sacramento, California; and the Dr. George Washington Carver Elementary School, a public school in Newark, New Jersey, are among the educational institutions bearing Carver’s name.
- Job Bicknell Ellis and Benjamin Matlack Everhart named Colletotrichum carveri and Metasphaeria carveri in 1902; Pier Andrea Saccardo and Domenico Saccardo named Cercospora carveriana in 1906; Anna Eliza Jenkins named Taphrina carveri in 1939; and E. F. Guba named Pestalotia carveri in 1961.
- In honor of George Washington Carver and his groundbreaking work with peanuts, the Montgomery Biscuits will adopt the alternate identity of the “Alabama Peanut Runners” for two games on August 28 and August 31, 2025.
Legacy
Prior to his passing, there was a push to create a national monument honoring George Washington in the United States. Such non-war expenses had been prohibited by presidential edict due to World War II. A bill for a memorial was introduced by Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri. During the bill’s committee hearing, a backer stated:
The bill is not simply a momentary pause on the part of busy men engaged in the conduct of the war, to do honor to one of the truly great Americans of this country, but it is in essence a blow against the Axis, it is in essence a war measure in the sense that it will further unleash and release the energies of roughly 15,000,000 Negro people in this country for full support of our war effort.
Both houses unanimously approved the bill.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated $30,000 (about $433,687 in 2024) to the George Washington Carver National Monument on July 14, 1943, west-southwest of Diamond, Missouri, where Carver had spent his early years. This was the first national monument honoring someone other than a president and the first to be dedicated to an African American. A bust of Carver, a 3/4-mile nature trail, a museum, the 1881 Moses Carver house, and the Carver cemetery are all part of the 210-acre (0.8 km2) national monument complex. July 1953 saw the opening of the national monument.
A large portion of the George Washington Museum’s collection was destroyed when a fire broke out there in December 1947. All but three of the 48 Carver paintings in the museum were destroyed, according to Time magazine. His most famous picture, which featured a yucca and cactus, was on display at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This canvas has been conserved and has survived. It is on show among a number of his other paintings. U.S. commemorative stamps from 1948 showed Carver. He and Booker T. Washington were featured on the commemorative Carver-Washington half-dollar coin from 1951 to 1954. As part of the Celebrate the Century stamp sheet series, a second stamp honoring Carver was released on February 3, 1998, with a face value of 32¢. He was honored by two ships: the nuclear submarine USS George Washington Carver (SSBN-656) and the Liberty ship SS George Washington Carver.
George Washington was chosen to join the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1977. He was admitted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990. Carver received a Doctor of Humane Letters from Iowa State University in 1994. Carver was named the “Father of Chemurgy” and inducted as a charter member of the USDA Hall of Heroes in 2000.
He is still honored by numerous organizations. Numerous elementary and high schools bear his name. On September 17, 2001, an academy named after Carver was established in San Antonio, Texas, by National Basketball Association star David Robinson and his wife Valerie. He is honored by the Carver Community Cultural site, a historic site in San Antonio.
George Washington Carver was named one of the 100 Greatest African Americans by researcher Molefi Kete Asante in 2002.
The American Chemical Society named Carver’s work at the Tuskegee Institute a National Historic Chemical Landmark in 2005. On February 15, 2005, a Modern Marvels episode about Carver’s work featured scenes from the Food Sciences Building at Iowa State University. A life-size statue of George Washington Carver is part of the garden that the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Missouri, opened in his honor in 2005.
George Washington was captured on color film by African American physician C. about 1937. In 2019, Allen Alexander was inducted to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. The 12-minute video, which was shot at the Tuskegee Institute, features Carver at his office, laboratory, and apartment. It also shows him tending flowers and showcasing his paintings.
Reputed inventions
Many inventions that did not originate in Carver’s laboratory have been attributed to him in popular folklore. George Washington received three patents between 1925 and 1927 (one for cosmetics, US 1522176, issued January 6, 1925; two for paints and stains, US 1541478, issued June 9, 1925, and US 1632365, issued June 14, 1927), but they were not profitable.
Apart from these patents and a few food recipes, George Washington left little documentation of his formulas or manufacturing processes. He didn’t maintain a lab journal. According to Mackintosh, “Carver did not explicitly claim that he had personally discovered all the peanut attributes and uses he cited, but he said nothing to prevent his audiences from drawing the inference.”
The goal of Carver’s study was to create common crop substitutes for commercial goods, which were typically too expensive for tiny, one-horse farmers. There was a growing misperception that his research on items for subsistence farmers was commercialized by others in an attempt to transform agriculture in the South. E. F. Schumacher’s work on “appropriate technology” was anticipated by Carver’s efforts to give small farmers resources for greater independence from the cash economy.
Carver bulletins
44 useful bulletins for farmers made up the majority of Carver’s formal published work during his more than 40 years at Tuskegee. In 1898, he published his first bulletin about giving farm animals acorns. The peanut was the subject of his last briefing in 1943. In addition, he released four bulletins on cowpeas, five on cotton, and six on sweet potatoes. Alfalfa, wild plums, tomatoes, ornamental plants, corn, poultry, dairying, hogs, preserving foods in hot weather, and nature education in schools were some of the topics covered in earlier newsletters.
How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it for Human Consumption, his most well-known bulletin, was first released in 1916 and has since been reprinted multiple times. In addition to a list of recipes from various agricultural bulletins, cookbooks, journals, and newspapers, including the Peerless Cookbook, Good Housekeeping, and Berry’s Fruit Recipes, it offers a brief summary of peanut crop cultivation. Although it wasn’t the first American agricultural bulletin about peanuts, Carver’s bulletins appear to have been more widely read and well-liked than those that came before him.
