George Washington Carver Biography

George Washington Carver was a celebrated botanist and inventor at a time when it was rare for Black Americans to reach those heights.

Born a slave in Missouri about 1864, near the end of the Civil War, George Washington Carver worked to educate himself in spite of the limited opportunities for freed Blacks in the area. He attended Iowa State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in agriculture studies in 1894 and a master’s in 1896.

He then joined the faculty of Booker T. Washington‘s Tuskegee Institute in 1896. Carver began working to find crop alternatives to cotton, which led him to study and experiment with the peanut. He ended up creating more than 325 products from the humble legume, helping to build demand for the plant and establish it as a major American crop.

Although George Washington Carver is often credited with inventing peanut butter,  it seems others had created that product before Carver began his own work with peanuts. Carver also worked with sweet potatoes, soybeans and pecans, and his work helped change the face of agriculture in the American south.