George Washington Carver was an American chemurgist and educator in scientific agriculture. He is known also for his scientific research on the peanut, from which he derived 300 different products.
Background
Carver was born about 1860 in Diamond, Mo. His mother, Mary, was a slave owned by Moses Carver, and his father was probably Giles, a slave owned by James Grant.
According to report, Giles was killed in an accident when George was an infant. The child and his mother were stolen by night riders, and only the boy was recovered, his ransom being a horse owned by Moses Carver, a German immigrant to the Ozark frontier.
George's early years were spent in the woods and the one-room cabin of Moses and his wife Susan. George shared a bed with an older boy named James, supposedly his half-brother. In his early teens, having learned to read and write from a Webster Blue Back Speller, he sought further education, and walked to the town of Neosho, some eight miles (13 km), where the Freedmen's Bureau had established the Lincoln School for Negro Children.
For the next few years, in poor health, George Carver, having taken the surname of his master according to the custom of freed slaves, wandered about Kansas doing odd jobs, chiefly household work. He studied constantly and attended schools wherever possible, finally graduating from high school in Minneapolis, Kan. Later, he fulfilled the college entrance examinations and was accepted to Highland University. However, when the principal saw George, he turned him away because the school did not admit blacks.
Discouraged, George drifted again, this time to the western territory. In 1886 he filed a homestead claim for 160 acres (64 hectares) and on it built a sod house. In less than four years the unproductiveness of barren land drove him back to Iowa. In one town where he stayed for a while, running a laundry, there lived another George Carver, a white man. Their mail was often confused, so he added a middle initial, picking "W" at random. When people assumed that it represented "Washington," he agreed that it might as well be that. Consequently, he became George Washington Carver.
Combined with his longing for higher education was Carver's desire to paint. In 1890, he entered Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, chiefly because the school advertised an art course. But, even during this year, he still intended to go South and help his own people. In order to master scientific agriculture at which he had previously dabbled, he transferred in May 1891 to the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts at Ames.
Career
The first showing of his paintings of flowers took place at a Cedar Rapids exhibition in 1892. One was entered at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and received honorable mention.
Carver's thesis for his bachelor's degree when he graduated in 1894 was based on the amaryllis and was entitled "Plants as Modified by Man." After graduation, he was offered a position at the college as assistant botanist specializing in hybridizing fruits. Not only was he the first black to be graduated from the college, but was the first black to serve on the faculty.
In 1896, Carver was asked by Booker T. Washington to join the staff of Tuskegee Institute, Ala. After his acceptance, he immediately started an agricultural experiment station. His objective was to build up wasteland of the South debilitated by the one-crop system (cotton being the single crop grown) and find new commercial uses for other native crops. Though his basic intent was to aid impoverished blacks, the white farmer was in almost as bad a state, and Carver aided both with his knowledge.
In 1897, Professor Carver was asked to collaborate with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture and with the Smithsonian Institution in cataloguing medicinal flora, and he constantly reported to the Division of Mycology and Disease Survey upon his discovery and identification of various fungi.
In his lecture tours of the South, preaching the trinity of soil, plant, and the human or animal body consuming the plant, and in his numerous bulletins including an "Outline for the Study of Economic Plant Life," he tried also to stimulate the development of other natural resources--for example, minerals, paints from clay, veneers, etc. During the wartime food shortage of 1918 he demonstrated in Washington various derivatives of the sweet potato, such as a flour substitute. These different products eventually numbered 118. Using the peanut, Carver created more than 300 different products, thus putting his laboratory not merely at the disposal of the farmer but also of the industrialist. His appearance with specimens before the Congressional House Ways and Means Committee in 1921 was largely instrumental in effecting the highest protective tariff the peanut industry ever enjoyed.
Carver always preferred to have others commercialize the results of his experiments, without himself becoming involved in business enterprises. When the banks failed in 1932 and Carver's savings disappeared, he was unconcerned, because he had little personal use for money. What accumulated after that from uncashed salary checks he willed in 1940 to the George Washington Carver Foundation for the purpose of providing scholarships for young blacks who might continue through laboratory techniques to successful equality in the business world.
Over a three-decade period, recognition was given this botanist and chemurgist, pioneer in the study of noncomestible products of the farm. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts of Great Britain in 1916 and awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1923 and the Theodore Roosevelt Medal in 1939. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Rochester in 1941.
