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George Washington Carver was born in 1864 near Diamond Grove, Missouri on the farm of Moses Carver. George never knew his father, who was rumored to be a slave from a neighboring farm. George and his mother were kidnapped by slave raiders during the war. After the war, Moses Carver found and reclaimed George, but George's mother was lost to him forever. Moses Carver and his wife Susan raised George and his brother as one of their own children.
George Washington Carver grew up in the chaotic time after the civil war. George began his formal education at the age of twelve. Since schools were segregated by race, and there were no nearby schools for black students, George had to leave his adopted family and work as a farm hand in southwest Missouri in order to study in a one-room schoolhouse. George attended Minneapolis High School in Kansas. After high school, Carver had a hard time getting into college due to racial barriers. Finally, at the age of thirty he was admitted to Simpson College in Indianola, a liberal arts college where he studied piano and art. Carver's interest centered on agriculture and he later transferred to Iowa Agricultural College where he gained a Bachelor of Science Degree in 1894 and after a Master of Science degree in Bacterial Botany and Agriculture. In 1897, Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes, convinced Carver to serve as the school's Director of Agriculture. Carver would remain at Tuskegee till his death in 1943.
At Tuskegee, Carver developed a new crop rotation method which alternated nitrate producing legumes like peanuts or peas one year with cotton the next. While peanuts were used to feed livestock, surpluses soon accumulated. To compensate for this surplus, Carver developed hundreds of uses for the peanut, from cooking oil to ink. Later Carver found that Sweet Potatoes or Pecans could also be effective rotation crops as well. This crop rotation method was essential for preserving the quality of the soil in the south, which in turn help save many small farms that were struggling to get by.
George Washington Carver was an extraordinary individual, who displayed remarkable character in the face of terrible adversity. Carver's integrity, generosity, and the turbulent times he lived in, sometimes overshadow his significant engineering accomplishments, but there is no question that he was one of the most influential and accomplished Engineers of the 19th (and 20th) century.
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