When was george washington carver born and died

Agricultural chemist, botanist, educator, and researcher

At a Glance…

Finally Gained Academic Opportunities

Began Lasting Affiliation with Tuskegee

Directed Innovative Agricultural Research

The “Goober” Genius

A National Leader

Carver’s Legacy

Sources

George Washington Carver was an agricultural chemist and botanist whose colorful life story and eccentric personality transformed him into a popular American folk hero to people of all races. Born into slavery, he spent his first 30 years wandering through three states and working at odd jobs to obtain a basic education. His lifelong effort thereafter to better the lives of poor Southern black farmers by finding commercial uses for the region’s agricultural products and natural resources—in particular the peanut, sweet potato, cowpea, soybean, and native clays from the soil—brought him international recognition as a humanitarian and chemical wizard. An accomplished artist and pianist as well, Carver was among the most famous black men in the United States during the early twentieth century.

Carver was born a slave on the plantation of Moses Carver near Diamond Grove, Missouri, sometime during the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865. His father appears to have died in a log-rolling accident shortly after George’s birth. The Carver farm was raided several times throughout the war, and on one occasion, according to legend, bandits kidnapped George, who was then an infant, and his mother, Mary, and took them to Arkansas. Mary was never found, but a neighbor rescued young George and returned him to the Carver farm, accepting as payment a horse valued at $300.

Now orphaned, George and his older brother, Jim, were raised by Moses and Susan Carver. George was frail and sickly and his frequent bouts with croup and whooping cough temporarily stunted his growth and permanently injured his vocal chords, leaving him with a high-pitched voice throughout his life. While his healthy brother grew up working on the Carver farm, George spent much of his childhood wandering in the nearby woods and studying the plants. Here he formed the interests and values that determined his later life—love and understanding of nature, long morning walks in the woods spent thinking and observing, strong religious training, and a taste of racial prejudice.

The Carvers realized that George was an extremely intelligent and gifted child eager for an education. But since he was black, he was not allowed to attend the local school. In 1877 he left home to study in a school for blacks in nearby Neosho, getting his first exposure to a predominantly black environment. He roomed with a local black couple, paying his way by helping with the chores. Soon exhausting his

At a Glance…

Born c. 1861, near Diamond Grove, MO; died January 5, 1943, in Tuskegee, AL; son of Mary (a slave on the farm of Moses Carver); father unknown, but believed to have died in an accident shortly after George’s birth. Education: Iowa State University, B.S., 1894, M.S., 1896. Religion: Presbyterian.

Worked odd jobs throughout Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa while pursuing a basic high school education, 1877-1890; Iowa State University, Ames, IA, assistant botanist and director of college greenhouse, 1894-1896; Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, AL, head of agriculture department, 1896-1910, head of department of research, 1910-1943; founder of George Washington Carver Foundation and Carver Museum at Tuskegee Institute; researcher focusing on improving Southern agriculture through crop diversification and finding multiple uses for various crops; author of articles on agriculture.

Awards: Fellow of the British Royal Society for the Arts, 1916; Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1923; from Simpson College, 1928; Roosevelt Medal for distinguished service to science, 1939; from University of Rochester, 1941; Thomas A. Edison Foundation Award, 1942; inducted into Hall of Fame for Great Americans, 1973, and National Inventors Hall of Fame, 1990.

teacher’s limited knowledge, he hitched a ride to Fort Scott, Kansas, in the late 1870s with another black family, becoming part of the mass exodus of Southern blacks to the Great Plains during that decade in search of a better life.

Carver worked as a cook, launderer, and grocery clerk while continuing to pursue his education. Witnessing a brutal lynching in March of 1879, he was terrified. As quoted by Linda O. McMurry in George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol, more than sixty years after the incident he wrote: “As young as I was the horror haunted me and does even now.” He immediately left Fort Scott and moved to Olathe, Kansas, again working odd jobs while attending school. There he lived with another local black couple, Ben and Lucy Seymour, following them to Minneapolis, Kansas, the next year. Obtaining a bank loan, Carver opened a laundry business, joined the Seymours’ local Presbyterian Church, and entered a school with whites, finally completing his secondary education.

In 1884 he moved to Kansas City, working as a clerk in the Union Depot. Accepted by mail at a Presbyterian college in Highland, Kansas, he was refused admission when he arrived because of his race. Though humiliated, he stayed in Highland to work for the Beelers, a cordial and supportive white family. Carver followed one of their sons to western Kansas in 1886 and tried homesteading, building a 14-square-foot sod house. But at that time he seemed more interested in playing the piano and organ and in painting than farming.

Finally Gained Academic Opportunities

Carver moved again in 1888 to Winterset, Iowa, where he worked at a hotel before opening another laundry. A local white couple he met at church, Dr. and Mrs. Milholland, persuaded him to enter Simpson College, a small Methodist school open to all, in nearby Indianola, Iowa. He enrolled in September of 1890 as a select preparatory student, one allowed to enter without an official high school degree. Carver was unique in more ways than one: besides being the only black student on campus, he was the only male studying art.

By all accounts his Simpson experience was enjoyable. Carver took in laundry to support himself, was accepted by his fellow students, and had many friends. But his art teacher, impressed by his talent with plants, strongly encouraged his transfer to the Iowa State College of Agriculture in Ames, which housed an agricultural experiment station considered one of the country’s leading centers of farming research. Three future U.S. secretaries of agriculture came from this university, including Professor James Wilson, who took Carver under his wing.

Again Carver was the only black on campus. He lived in an old office, ate in the basement, supported himself with menial jobs, and was active in the campus branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Soon he stood out for his talent as well. One of his paintings was among those chosen to represent Iowa at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The faculty, equally impressed by his ability to raise, cross-fertilize, and graft plants, persuaded him to stay on as a post-graduate after he graduated in 1894.

Carver was appointed to the faculty as an assistant botanist in charge of the college greenhouse. He continued his studies under Louis Pammel, an authority in mycology (fungi and other plant diseases), receiving a master’s degree in science in 1896.

Began Lasting Affiliation with Tuskegee

The new graduate was in great demand. Iowa State wanted him to continue working there. Alcorn Agriculture & Mechanical College, a black school in Mississippi, was interested in his services. But when school principal Booker T. Washington, the most respected black educator in the country, asked Carver to establish an agricultural school and experiment station at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he accepted. According to Barry Mackintosh in American Heritage, Carver responded: “Of course 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 my life for these many years, feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom for our people.”

Tuskegee was an entirely new world for Carver—an all-black, industrial trade school located in the segregated deep South. He went because he agreed with Washington’s efforts to improve the lives of the country’s black citizens through education, economic development, and conciliation rather than political agitation. He would devote the rest of his life to the institution and its goals.

Carver arrived at Tuskegee in the fall of 1896 and immediately ran into problems. Many of the faculty members resented him because he was a dark-skinned black from the North who was educated in white schools and earned a higher salary than they did. Carver was a trained research scientist, not a teacher, at a primarily industrial trade school. He had few pupils, for the simple reason that most black students viewed a college education as a way to escape from the farm. In addition, he proved to be a poor administrator and financial manager of the school’s two farms, barns, livestock, poultry, dairy, orchards, and beehives.

Washington and Carver often clashed. The realistic and pragmatic school principal expected practical results, while his idealistic, research-oriented professor preferred working at the school’s 10-acre experimental farm. In 1910 Carver was removed as head of the agriculture department and put in charge of a newly formed department of research. He gradually gave up teaching except for his Sunday evening Bible classes.

Directed Innovative Agricultural Research

Carver found his true calling as head of the Tuskegee Experiment Station, working on research projects designed to help Southern agriculture in general and the poor black farmer, “the man farthest down,” in particular. Alabama agriculture was in a sorry state when he arrived. Many farmers were impoverished, and much of the state’s soil had been exhausted and eroded by extensive single-crop cotton cultivation. Carver set out to find a better way and to make Tuskegee a leading voice in Southern agricultural reform, as well as an important research, information, and educational center.

He encouraged local farmers to visit the school and to send in soil, water, crops, feed, fertilizers, and insects to his laboratory for analysis. Most of his findings and advice stressed hard work and the wise use of natural resources rather than expensive machinery or fertilizer that the area’s poor farmers could not afford. Realizing that his discoveries and those of other agricultural researchers nationwide would have little effect unless publicized, Carver brought Tuskegee to the countryside by creating the Agriculture Movable School, a wagon that traveled to local farms with exhibits and demonstrations.

He also attempted to reach a wide audience with the experiment station’s bulletins and brochures that he wrote and published from 1898 until his death. Rarely containing new ideas, Carver’s bulletins instead publicized findings by agricultural researchers throughout the country in simple, non-technical language aimed at farmers and their wives. His early bulletins stressed the need for planting crops other than cotton to restore the soil, the importance of crop rotation, strategies for managing an efficient and profitable farm, and ways to cure and keep meat during the hot southern summers. They also offered instructions on pickling, canning, and preserving foods and lessons on preparing balanced meals.

The “Goober” Genius

To replace cotton, the longtime staple of Southern agriculture, Carver experimented with sweet potatoes and cowpeas (also known as black-eyed peas), along with crops new to Alabama like soybeans and alfalfa, the soil-building qualities of which would revitalize cotton-exhausted soil. He publicized his results in several bulletins from 1903 to 1911, providing growing tips and listing uses ranging from livestock feed to recipes for human consumption. But none of these crops became as popular with farmers or caught the public’s fancy as his work with the ordinary peanut.

When Carver arrived in Tuskegee in 1896, the peanut was not even recognized as a crop. A few years later, Carver grew some Spanish peanuts at the experiment station. Recognizing its value in restoring nitrogen to depleted Southern soil, he mentioned the peanut in his 1905 bulletin, How to Build Up Worn Out Soils. Eleven years later another bulletin, How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption, focused on the peanut’s high protein and nutritional value, using ideas and recipes published previously in other U.S. Department of Agriculture bulletins.

A revolution was underway in Southern agriculture, and Carver was right in the middle of it. Peanut production increased from 3.5 million bushels in 1889 to more than 40 million bushels in 1917. Following a post-World War I decline in production, peanuts became the South’s second cash crop after cotton by 1940.

After publicizing the peanut and encouraging Southern farmers to grow it, Carver turned his attention to finding new uses for the once-lowly goober. Learning of his work, the United Peanut Associations of America asked Carver to speak at their 1920 convention in Montgomery, Alabama. His address, “The Possibilities of the Peanut,” was noteworthy for two reasons: a black addressing a white organization in the segregated South and Carver’s knowledge and enthusiasm about the product.

The following year he testified before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, captivating congressional representatives with his showmanship and ideas for multiple derivatives from the crop including candy, ink, and ice cream flavoring. Mackintosh noted that Carver established his new celebrity nationwide, telling the lawmakers, “I have just begun with the peanut”. From then on he was known as the “Peanut Man.” After his death, the Carver Museum at Tuskegee credited him with developing 287 peanut byproducts, including food and beverages, paints or dyes, livestock feed, cosmetics, and medicinal preparations. Peanut butter, however, was not among his discoveries. His similar laboratory work with the sweet potato totaled 159 commodities like flour, molasses, vinegar, various dyes, and synthetic rubber.

But in reality, most of these by-products were more fanciful than practical and could be mass-produced more easily from other substances. Peanuts continued to be used almost entirely for peanut butter, peanut oil, and for baked goods instead of the plethora of products Carver concocted. For all his discoveries, he only held three patents: two for paint products and one for a cosmetic. None was commercially successful.

Carver’s laboratory methods were equally unorthodox and not in accord with standard scientific procedures. He usually worked alone, was uncommunicative with other researchers, and rarely wrote down his many formulas or left detailed records of his experiments. Instead, he claimed to work by divine revelation, receiving instructions from “Mr. Creator” in his laboratory.

A National Leader

Carver’s prestige began to rise after Booker T. Washington’s death in 1915. Given his growing celebrity status, he became Tuskegee’s unofficial spokesman and a popular speaker nationwide at black and white civic groups, colleges, churches, and state fairs. He often played the piano at fund-raising events for the school. Carver was named a fellow of the British Royal Society for the Arts in 1916 and received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1923 for advancing the black cause.

A fanciful 1932 article in American Magazine solely credited Carver with increasing peanut production and developing important new peanut products that transformed Southern agriculture. Reprinted in the Reader’s Digest in 1937, it boosted his soaring popularity as a scientific wizard. Backed by automobile manufacturer Henry Ford and inventor Thomas Edison, Carver became the unofficial spokesman of the chemurgy movement of the 1930s that combined chemistry and related sciences for the benefit of farmers. Continuing his work with peanuts, he encouraged the use of peanut oil as a massage to help in the recovery of polio victims.

With his soft-spoken manner, strong Christian beliefs, scientific reputation, seeming disregard for money, and accomodationist viewpoint toward the nation’s racial question, Carver became a national symbol for both races. Southern whites approved of his seeming acceptance of segregation and used his accomplishments as an example of how a talented black individual could excel in their separate but equal society. Blacks and liberal whites saw Carver as a positive role model and much-needed symbol of black success and intellectual achievement, a man who visited U.S. presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge and dined with Henry Ford.

Carver’s Legacy

Carver left his life savings of $60,000 to found the George Washington Carver Foundation—to provide opportunities for advanced study by blacks in botany, chemistry, and agronomy— and the Carver Museum, to preserve his scientific work and paintings at Tuskegee. The site of Moses Carver’s farm is now the George Washington Carver National Monument. A U.S. postage stamp was issued in the agricultural pioneer’s honor, and Congress has designated January 5, the day of his death, to pay tribute to him each year.

At his death from complications of anemia in 1943, Carver remained the most famous African-American of his era, world renowned as a scientific wizard. However, none of his hundreds of formulas for peanut, sweet potato, and other by-products became successful commercial products. Nor was he solely instrumental in diversifying Southern agriculture from cotton to peanuts and other crops. The great boom in Southern peanut production occurred prior to World War I and Carver’s bulletins promoting the crop.

Carver’s true importance in history lay elsewhere. For nearly 50 years he remained in the South, working to improve the lives of the region’s many poor farmers, black and white. Through his talents as an interpreter and promoter, he put the agricultural discoveries and technical writings of leading scientists in everyday language that ill-educated farmers could understand and use. And in an age of strict racial segregation, his importance as a role model and national symbol of black ability, education, and achievement cannot be undervalued.

Sources

Books

Adair, Gene, George Washington Carver, Chelsea House, 1989.

George Washington Carver: The Man Who Overcame, Prentice-Hall, 1966.

Holt, Rackham, George Washington Carver: An American Biography, Doubleday, 1943.

Kremer, Gary R., George Washington Carver: In His Own Words, University of Missouri Press, 1987.

McMurry, Linda O., George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol, Oxford University Press, 1981.

Moore, Eva, The Story of George Washington Carver, Scholastic Inc., 1990.

Periodicals

American Heritage, August 1977.

American Magazine, October 1932.

Ebony, July 1977.

Jet, January 29, 1990.

Journal of Black Studies, September 1988.

Journal of Southern History, November 1976.

Life, March 1937.

—James J. Podesta