George Washington Carver

Moses Carver bought Mary and Giles for 700 dollars in October 1855, and the child born to them in Missouri in the early 1860s never learned his own birthday. Night raiders out of Arkansas carried mother and infant off to Kentucky and sold them. A hired tracker recovered only the baby. Mary was never found. The boy was frail, wrecked by whooping cough and croup, and spoke in a high pitch for the rest of his life. Barred from the school in Diamond Grove, he walked ten miles to Neosho, found it closed for the night, and slept in a barn. The woman who took him in told him his name was George Carver, not Carver's George, and that he should learn everything he could and bring it back.

Later, sorting out mail confusion with another George Carver in town, he picked a middle initial at random. Asked whether the W stood for Washington, he grinned and said, why not. Highland University accepted him by post and turned him away at the door for his race. He got in at Simpson College in 1890, moved to Iowa State in 1891 as its first Black student, took a bachelor's degree in 1894 and a master's in 1896, and joined its faculty. Booker T. Washington hired him away that year to run agriculture at Tuskegee, where he stayed 47 years. He preached crop rotation against soil ruined by cotton, built an extension service to carry it, designed a wagon that was a classroom, and wrote 44 bulletins for farmers who owned one horse.

The famous scientist held three patents, all issued between 1925 and 1927, for cosmetics, paints and stains, and none of them sold. He kept no laboratory notebook and left no formulae. His one real commercial venture, Penol, was creosote mixed with peanuts and sold for tuberculosis, and the Food and Drug Administration found it did not work. He was a poor administrator who fought with the Tuskegee faculty and complained by 1900 that the paperwork was crushing him. And he let the legend run. He never explicitly claimed to have discovered every peanut use he demonstrated, but as one historian put it, he said nothing to stop his audiences from concluding that he had.

He gave nearly 60,000 dollars, most of what he had, to found a research foundation at Tuskegee in 1938. He died on January 5, 1943, of anemia after a fall down a flight of stairs, and was buried beside Booker T. Washington. Six months later Franklin Roosevelt put 30,000 dollars into a national monument on the Missouri ground where he was born, the first for an African American and the first for anyone who had not been president. A witness at the hearing argued for it as a war measure. In December 1947 a fire in his museum destroyed all but three of his 48 paintings. He is on the stamp, the half dollar, and Missouri's 2024 innovation dollar.

George Washington Carver's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Jesup Agricultural Wagon invention
  A mobile classroom that carried soil science to farms that could not come to Tuskegee 1906
• How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption book
  The best known of his 44 farmers' bulletins 1916
• Testimony on the peanut tariff speech
  Southern congressmen mocked him, then kept voting him more time 1921
• U.S. Patent 1,522,176 patent
  Cosmetics. The first of the only three patents he ever held 1925
• George Washington Carver Foundation company
  Endowed at Tuskegee with nearly 60,000 dollars of his own savings 1938

• 1864 aged ~0 Night raiders carry off the infant and his mother Only the baby was recovered. Mary was never traced.
• c. 1877 aged ~13 Moves to Fort Scott, Kansas, for the academy, and leaves after seeing a lynching He finished high school in Minneapolis, Kansas.
• 1890 aged ~26 Enrolls at Simpson College in Iowa Highland University had accepted him by mail and turned him away in person.
• 1894 aged ~30 Takes a bachelor's degree at Iowa State A master's followed in 1896, along with a place on the faculty.
• 1896 aged ~32 Booker T. Washington hires him to head agriculture at Tuskegee He taught there for 47 years.
• 1921 aged ~57 Testifies on the peanut tariff before the House Ways and Means Committee The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 duly taxed imported peanuts.
• 1937 aged ~73 Meets Henry Ford at a chemurgy conference in Dearborn Ford later had an elevator put into Carver's Tuskegee dormitory so he would not have to climb.
• January 5, 1943 aged 79 Dies of anemia after a fall down a flight of stairs He was found unconscious by a maid. He had been painting a Christmas card.
• July 14, 1943 aged 79 Congress creates a national monument to him in Missouri The first national monument to an African American, and the first to anyone who was not a president.

• Booker T. Washington 1856–1915
  Educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational training for African Americans. hired by
• Henry Ford 1863–1947
  Industrialist who revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line and made automobiles affordable. friend of
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. publicly admired by
• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. monument sponsored by
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. monument funded by