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Turn of the Century · Science

George Washington Carver

c. 1864 – 1943

Agricultural scientist and Tuskegee Institute educator who promoted soil conservation, crop diversification, and new uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes.

George Washington Carver standing in a field, probably at Tuskegee, holding a piece of soil, 1906
Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1906. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

Born enslaved during the Civil War, George Washington Carver earned two degrees from Iowa State and spent 47 years at Tuskegee Institute teaching poor Southern farmers to rebuild exhausted soil. His promotion of the peanut made him the most famous Black scientist in America, and his reputation grew into a legend that historians have since worked to separate from his real and substantial record.

At a Glance

Born
c. 1864 (exact date unknown), Diamond Grove, Newton County, Missouri
Died
5 January 1943, Tuskegee, Alabama
Known for
Tuskegee Agricultural Experiment Station bulletins; the Jesup Agricultural Wagon (1906); testimony on the peanut before the House Ways and Means Committee (1921)
HBCU ties
Tuskegee University (Faculty member and director of the agricultural experiment station, 1896–1943)
Fields
Science · Education · Invention
Era
Turn of the Century

Early Life

Carver was born enslaved on the farm of Moses and Susan Carver near Diamond Grove, in southwestern Missouri, sometime during the Civil War; neither the exact date nor the year is known, and estimates range from about 1860 to 1865. While he was an infant, raiders carried off him and his mother, Mary. The Carvers recovered the child, reportedly in exchange for a horse, but his mother was never found. Raised by the Carvers after emancipation along with his brother Jim, the sickly boy spent much of his time in the woods and became known locally as a “plant doctor.”

Barred from the local school because he was Black, he left home at about eleven to attend a school for Black children in nearby Neosho, lodging with a Black couple, Andrew and Mariah Watkins. He spent the next decade and more moving through Kansas, supporting himself as a cook, launderer, and farmhand, finishing high school, and briefly homesteading on the western plains.

In 1890 Carver enrolled at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, to study art and piano. An art teacher who noticed his botanical skill urged him toward science, and in 1891 he transferred to the Iowa State Agricultural College in Ames, where he was the first Black student. He earned a B.S. in 1894, joined the experiment station staff as an assistant botanist, and received an M.S. in 1896, becoming the college’s first Black faculty member. At Ames he studied plant pathology and mycology and took the young Henry A. Wallace, a future secretary of agriculture and vice president, on botanical walks.

Life and Work

In April 1896 Booker T. Washington invited Carver to head agricultural work at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, and he arrived that fall. The following year Alabama funded an agricultural experiment station at Tuskegee, which Carver directed. The station tested crop varieties and fertilizers and analyzed soil, feed, and water, while Carver sought cheap substitutes for inputs that impoverished tenant farmers could not afford, such as swamp muck and compost for fertilizer.

Carver took his message to farmers directly. From 1898 until his death, bulletins issued under his name urged Black Belt farmers to break their dependence on cotton by rotating crops, planting nitrogen-fixing legumes such as cowpeas and peanuts, and growing sweet potatoes and other food crops. In 1906 he designed the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, a horse-drawn demonstration school named for its financial backer, the New York banker Morris K. Jesup, which carried equipment and instruction into rural communities. His relationship with Washington was often strained over his handling of teaching and the school farms, and in 1910 Washington relieved him of the agriculture department and placed him in charge of a new department of research.

In 1916 Carver published How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption, a bulletin that openly drew on existing recipes. After World War I he began developing products from peanuts and sweet potatoes, and in September 1920 he addressed the United Peanut Associations of America in Montgomery. In January 1921 the industry sent him to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee in support of a tariff on imported peanuts. Some congressmen greeted him with condescension, but he held the committee well past his allotted time with samples of dyes, milk substitutes, and other products. The appearance made him nationally known as “the peanut man.”

Carver later claimed more than 300 uses for the peanut and more than 100 for the sweet potato. Contrary to popular belief, he did not invent peanut butter, which was being made and patented before his peanut work began and does not appear on the list of peanut products later compiled by the Tuskegee museum. Historian Barry Mackintosh has shown that few of Carver’s formulations reached commercial use and that the major expansion of Southern peanut growing preceded his fame. Carver did engage in business ventures and received three patents, granted in 1925 and 1927, one for a peanut-based cosmetic and two for paints and stains. In 1923 the NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal, and in 1940 he gave his savings to establish the George Washington Carver Foundation at Tuskegee to support agricultural research.

Legacy

Carver died at Tuskegee on 5 January 1943 and is buried in the Tuskegee University campus cemetery. In July 1943 Congress authorized the George Washington Carver National Monument at his Missouri birthplace, the first national monument dedicated to an African American. He was enshrined in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1977 and to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990.

During his lifetime, journalists, peanut manufacturers, and Tuskegee itself built Carver into a symbol, the humble genius who saved the South, and white audiences often found in him a Black figure who did not challenge segregation. Scholars including Linda O. McMurry and Mark D. Hersey have since shifted the emphasis to what he actually did: tireless extension work among the rural poor, and an ecological vision of soil conservation and use of local resources that anticipated later sustainable agriculture.

For Educators

George Washington Carver’s real achievement was practical science for poor Southern farmers, a record historians have worked to separate from the peanut legend that made him famous. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. c. 1864 Born enslaved near Diamond Grove, Missouri; exact date unknown.
  2. 1891 Transfers to Iowa State Agricultural College as its first Black student.
  3. 1894 Earns a B.S. from Iowa State; M.S. follows in 1896.
  4. 1896 Joins Tuskegee Institute at Booker T. Washington’s invitation.
  5. 1906 Designs the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, a mobile farm school.
  6. 1916 Publishes How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption.
  7. January 1921 Testifies on the peanut before the House Ways and Means Committee.
  8. 1923 Receives the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal.
  9. 5 January 1943 Dies at Tuskegee, Alabama.
  10. July 1943 Congress authorizes the George Washington Carver National Monument.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. Linda O. McMurry, George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
  2. Mark D. Hersey, My Work Is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
  3. Barry Mackintosh, “George Washington Carver and the Peanut,” American Heritage 28, no. 5 (August 1977). Link
  4. National Park Service, “George Washington Carver.” Link
  5. Science History Institute, “George Washington Carver.” Link
  6. Mark Hersey, “George Washington Carver (1864–1943),” BlackPast.org. Link

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By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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