George Washington Carver is revered as one of our nation's greatest inventors and scientists.  His work to discover new uses for crops and develop new agricultural methods revolutionized American agriculture. 

          In 1865, Carver was born in Diamond, Missouri.  He was a slave owned by the Moses Carver family, but when he was only one week old Carver, his mother and sister were kidnapped and sold to a family in Kentucky.  Moses hired John Bentley to find the kidnapped slaves, but only Carver was found and returned. 

          After slavery was abolished, Moses' family raised Carver as their own child.  They encouraged him to learn to read and write and, at the age of 12, he left the Carvers' home to attend a one-room school house in Newton County in southwest Missouri.  As a young adult, he was admitted as the first black student at Simpson College in Iowa.  He later transferred to Iowa Agricultural College, today known as Iowa State University, to study botany.  Upon graduation, he joined the faculty of Iowa Agricultural College, becoming the first black faculty member, where he taught and researched soil technology.

          With encouragement from Booker T. Washington, Carver joined the staff of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes in 1887 to serve as the school's Director of Agriculture.  As a researcher at the Tuskegee Institute, Carver developed a crop rotation method and encouraged farmers to alternate plantings of cotton and tobacco with plantings of sweet potatoes and legumes, like peanuts or soybeans.  This new method was particularly helpful in the south, where decades of only growing cotton and tobacco crops had depleted the soil.

          Carver also worked to develop new industrial applications for agricultural crops.  He invented over 300 uses for the peanut and hundreds of uses for the pecan and sweet potato.  Among some of the items he developed were bleach, paper, plastic, shaving cream, shoe polish, mayonnaise, and wood stain.  Although Carver was responsible for inventing hundreds of new products and agricultural methods, he only applied for three patents and did not make profits from most of his discoveries. 

          Upon his death, he gave his life savings to the establishment of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee for continued research in agriculture.  Today, you can visit the George Washington Carver National Monument and boyhood home in Diamond, Missouri.