American agricultural scientist and inventor George Washington Carver (c. 1864–January 5, 1943) advocated for soil depletion prevention techniques and crops other than cotton. He was among the most well-known African American scientists in the early 20th century.
George Washington created methods to replenish soil types depleted by frequent cotton plantings while he was a professor at the Tuskegee Institute. In order to raise their standard of living and provide their own food, he encouraged impoverished farmers to cultivate additional crops like sweet potatoes and peanuts. Under his direction, the Experiment Station at Tuskegee published more than forty useful bulletins for farmers, many of which were written by him and included recipes. Many of the bulletins offered guidance to low-income farmers on how to prevent soil depletion, grow larger crops, and preserve food.
He was a pioneer in advancing environmentalism in addition to his efforts to better the lives of farmers. For his efforts, he was awarded multiple awards, including the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal. His notoriety extended beyond the black community during a time of intense racial division. In the white community, he was generally acknowledged and commended for his numerous accomplishments and skills. Time magazine called Carver a “Black Leonardo” in 1941.
Early Life
Sometime in the early 1860s, George Washington was born into slavery at Diamond Grove, which is now Diamond, Newton County, Missouri, close to Crystal Palace. Since he was born before slavery was outlawed in Missouri in January 1865, during the American Civil War, Carver was unaware of his exact birthdate. George’s parents, Mary and Giles, were bought from William P. McGinnis on October 9, 1855, for $700 (~18,609 in 2024) by his enslaver, Moses Carver, who came from a family of immigrants of German or English ancestry.
Giles passed away before George Washington was born, and night raiders from Arkansas abducted him, his mother, and sister when he was just a week old. James, George’s brother, was hurried away from the abductors. The three were sold in Kentucky by the kidnappers. John Bentley was recruited by Moses Carver to locate them, but he was only able to locate the baby George. Moses compensated Bentley after negotiating the boy’s return with the raiders. Moses Carver and his wife, Susan, reared George and his elder brother, James, as their own children following the abolition of slavery. “Aunt Susan” taught George the fundamentals of reading and writing, and they encouraged him to pursue his academic goals.
Black students were not permitted to attend Diamond Grove’s public school. George Washington made the decision to attend a black children’s school in Neosho, which is 10 miles (16 km) south. The school was closed for the night when he arrived in the town. He slept in a barn close by. According to his own story, he met Mariah Watkins, a kind woman, the following morning and asked to rent a room from her. She responded that going forward, his name will be “George Carver” when he identified himself as “Carver’s George,” as he had done his entire life.
Mariah Watkins’ advice, “You must learn all you can, then go back out into the world and give your learning back to the people,” had a profound effect on George Washington. At the age of 13, he moved to the home of another foster family in Fort Scott, Kansas, because he wanted to attend the academy there. Carver left the city after seeing a black man killed by a group of white people, and he attended a number of schools before graduating from Minneapolis High School in Minneapolis, Kansas.
There was another George Carver in Minneapolis during his stay, which complicated letter delivery. George Washington started asking correspondence to be addressed to him as George W. Carver after selecting a middle initial at random. When someone once wondered if the “W” stood for Washington, Carver smiled and replied, “Why not?” Nevertheless, he signed his name as George W. Carver or just George Carver and never used Washington as his middle name.
College Education
Before being admitted to Highland University in Highland, Kansas, George Washington applied to a number of universities. Due to his race, they would not allow him to attend when he arrived. Carver and J. F. Beeler took a wagon from Highland to Eden Township in Ness County, Kansas, in August of 1886. He homesteaded a claim close to Beeler, where he kept a geology collection and a small conservatory of plants and flowers. He plowed 17 acres (69,000 m2) of the claim by hand and planted a variety of fruit trees, forest trees, shrubbery, rice, corn, Indian corn, and garden food. In addition, he worked as a ranch hand and did odd tasks in town to make money.
George Washington secured a $300 (~10,499 in 2024) loan from the Bank of Ness City for his study at the beginning of 1888. He left the area by June. Carver enrolled in Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, to study piano and art in 1890. Carver’s art instructor, Etta Budd, urged him to study botany at Iowa State Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) in Ames after noticing his gift for drawing flowers and plants.
He was the first Black student at Iowa State when he started in 1891. “Plants as Modified by Man” was Carver’s 1894 bachelor’s thesis for a degree in agriculture. Carver was persuaded to pursue his master’s degree at Iowa State University by instructors Joseph Budd and Louis Pammel.
For the next two years, Carver worked under Pammel at the Iowa Agricultural and Home Economics Experiment Station. He first became well-known and respected nationally as a botanist because to his work in plant pathology and mycology at the experiment station. In 1896, Carver earned his MSc. Carver was Iowa State’s first African American faculty member.
George Washington never obtained an actual doctorate, although being referred to as “doctor” on occasion. In a private correspondence with Pammel, he stated that the title was a “misnomer” bestowed upon him by others because of his skills and their presumptions about his education. During his lifetime, he received honorary doctorates of science from Simpson College and Selma University, despite not having an official doctorate. He also received a posthumous doctor of humane letters degree from Iowa State in 1994.
Rise to Fame
George Washington created methods to replenish soils that had been eroded by several cotton plantings. He and other agricultural specialists advised farmers to use systematic crop rotation, which alternates cotton crops with plantings of sweet potatoes or legumes like peanuts, soybeans, and cowpeas, in order to replenish nitrogen in their soils. Both of these crops were suitable for human food and replenished the soil with nitrogen.
Crop rotation increased cotton yields and provided farmers with other income crops. George Washington created an agricultural extension program for Alabama that was comparable to the Iowa State program in order to teach farmers how to successfully cycle and cultivate the new crops. He disseminated recipes utilizing the substitute crops to promote improved nutrition in the South.
He established an industrial research laboratory where he and his staff developed hundreds of uses for the new crops in an effort to make them more widely known. In addition to marketing apps and recipes they gathered from others, they conducted original research. Carver disseminated his knowledge through agricultural bulletins.
Before George Washington became well-known, leaders in the nation’s capital were aware of his work. His effort was publicly praised by President Theodore Roosevelt. Former Carver’s professors from Iowa State University were appointed to roles as Secretary of Agriculture: James Wilson, a former Carver’s professor and dean, held the position from 1897 until 1913. From 1921 until 1924, Henry Cantwell Wallace was in office. Because the researcher and his son Henry A. Wallace were friends, he was directly acquainted with Carver. The younger Wallace held the positions of vice president under Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1941 to 1945 and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from 1933 to 1940.
On his demonstration farm, American industrialist, farmer, and inventor William C. Edenborn of Winn Parish, Louisiana, cultivated peanuts. He conferred with Carver.
One of just a few Americans at the time, George Washington was admitted to the Royal Society of Arts in England in 1916. Carver received the most attention for his advocacy of peanuts.
Low prices on imported peanuts from the Republic of China were undercutting American peanut growers by 1920. Representatives from the peanut industry and farmers intended to show up at congressional hearings in 1921 to request a tariff. They invited the African-American professor to testify on the tariff problem before the Ways and Means Committee of the US House of Representatives based on the caliber of Carver’s presentation at their conference. It was extremely uncommon for an African American to testify as an expert witness because of segregation, but Carver showed up and presented a number of exhibits and samples to support his argument for the peanut’s increased use in food and industry.
He was ridiculed by Southern legislators, but committee members kept extending his evidence as he discussed the significance of the peanut and its applications in American manufacturing and agriculture. A tariff on imported peanuts was part of the 1922 Fordney-McCumber Tariff. George Washington became well-known as a public figure because to his testimony, which included samples of peanut milk, peanut flour, industrial pigments created from peanuts, and other peanut-based items.
Life while Famous
George Washington appeared to relish his famous position throughout the latter twenty years of his life. He frequently traveled about advocating for racial harmony, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and Tuskegee University. He maintained a syndicated newspaper column titled “Professor Carver’s Advice” and published papers in peanut industry journals, despite only publishing six agricultural bulletins after 1922. When business leaders came to him for assistance, he frequently offered free counsel in return. He visited with three American presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Theodore Roosevelt, and spent three weeks studying with the Crown Prince of Sweden. Carver visited white Southern colleges as part of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation from 1923 to 1933.
George Washington became the focus of articles and biographies as his fame grew. He was contacted by Raleigh H. Merritt for his 1929 biography. Merritt penned:
At present not a great deal has been done to utilize Dr. Carver’s discoveries commercially. He says that he is merely scratching the surface of scientific investigations of the possibilities of the peanut and other Southern products.
Relationships
George Washington didn’t get married. He started courting Sarah L. Hunt, an elementary school teacher and the sister-in-law of Tuskegee Institute Treasurer Warren Logan, when he was forty years old. This continued for three years before she accepted a teaching position in California. Christina Vella examines Carver’s relationships in her 2015 biography, arguing that he was bisexual and confined by the social mores of his era.
He became friends with and collaborated on research with physicist Austin W. Curtis Jr. when he was seventy years old. Before going to Tuskegee, this young black man, a Cornell University alumnus, had some teaching experience. Carver left Curtis the royalties from Rackham Holt’s 1943 authorized biography. Curtis was let go from the Tuskegee Institute following Carver’s death in 1943. He moved to Detroit after leaving Alabama. He produced and marketed personal care items made from peanuts there.
Death
One day, Carver fell down a flight of stairs while returning home; a maid discovered him unconscious and rushed him to a hospital. Due to complications (anemia) brought on by this accident, Carver passed away on January 5, 1943, at the age of 78 or 79. He passed away while sitting up in bed and drawing a Christmas card that read, “Peace on earth and goodwill to all men.” According to Prema Ramakrishnan, a biography of Carver, “His death was characteristic of him and his entire life’s work.” At Tuskegee University, he was laid to rest beside Booker T. Washington. Because of his modest lifestyle, Carver saved up a total of $60,000, which he presented to the George Washington Carver Foundation and the Carver Museum during his final years.
It was stated on his tombstone, “He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world.”
