George Washington Carver

Agricultural chemist George Washington Carver shaped the future of farming by developing innovative crop-rotation methods for conserving nutrients in soil, and by discovering hundreds of new uses for crops including the peanut and sweet potato.

Carver was born in Diamond Grove, Missouri, in 1864. Both his father, who died before Carver’s birth, and his mother were enslaved. When he was a baby, he and his mother were abducted from a farm that was owned by Moses and Susan Carver. Though he was rescued by a neighbor and returned to the Carver farm, his mother was not, so he and his brother Jim were raised by the Carvers.

During his youth, Carver was often ill and weak, so he spent much of his time on chores like cooking, doing laundry and tending to the garden, rather than helping with farm work like his brother. As he grew his knowledge of nature, gardening and agriculture, he soon became known as “the plant doctor” to nearby farmers because they’d found he was skilled at helping them improve the health of their fields and crops.

Carver also developed a deep love of learning. When he was just 11, he traveled to Neosho, Missouri, to attend a school for Black children. However, he was disappointed with the quality of the education he received there, so he decided to move west to Kansas in the late 1870s. Carver then began moving from one Midwestern community to another, attending various schools and applying the strong domestic skills he’d built throughout his youth.

In the late 1880s, Carver moved to Iowa, and in 1890 he enrolled at Simpson College in Indianola to study grammar, arithmetic, etymology, voice and piano. A year later, he transferred to Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1894 and his master’s degree in 1896.

Following Carver’s graduation, Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), persuaded him to serve as the school's director of agriculture. Upon accepting the position, Carver wrote, “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 myself these many years; feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people."

While at Tuskegee, Carver conducted soil studies and discovered that the region’s soil was ideal for growing peanuts and sweet potatoes. Though cotton was the most popular crop in the South at the time, it was very nutrient-intensive to grow. To address this, Carver began teaching farmers that rotating their soil-depleting cotton crops with nitrate-producing legumes and sweet potatoes could both improve the health of their soil and increase their cotton yield.

As southern farmers began rotating their crops, planting peanuts and sweet potatoes one year and cotton the next, large surpluses soon developed. This inspired Carver to invent many different uses for these crops. He developed ways to turn sweet potatoes into flour, vinegar, writing ink, dyes and paints – but it was with peanuts that he found his greatest success. He developed 325 different uses for peanuts, including milk, cooking oil, paper, soap and wood stains.

In 1921, Carver made an appearance before the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. He had become a prominent figure in the peanut industry, which was seeking tariff protection. Describing the many different products derived from peanuts, Carver earned the committee’s tariff approval, as well as a standing ovation. By 1940, the peanut was ranked among the six leading crops in the country and became the second most popular cash crop in the South behind cotton.

Through his groundbreaking research and inventions, Carver helped raise the living conditions of poor farmers across the South, improving both their cotton yield and their families’ diets with the growth and consumption of peanuts and sweet potatoes. Upon his death in 1943, Carver donated his life savings to establish a research institute at Tuskegee. The same year, Congress passed a bill establishing his birthplace as a national monument, and in 1953, the location was officially dedicated to Carver – the first ever location dedicated to a Black American and non-president. In 2005, the American Chemical Society named Carver’s work a National Historic Chemical Landmark.