George Washington Carver (c. 1864[1] – January 5, 1943) was an American agricultural scientist and inventor who promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion.

While a professor at Tuskegee Institute, Carver developed techniques to improve types of soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton.

He wanted poor farmers to grow other crops, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, as a source of their own food and to improve their quality of life.

His enslaver, Moses Carver, descended from a family of immigrants of German or English descent,[6] had purchased George's parents, Mary and Giles, from William P. McGinnis on October 9, 1855, for $700 (~$18,133 in 2023).

[19][20] Iowa State University professors Joseph Budd and Louis Pammel convinced Carver to continue there for his master's degree.

[3] Carver taught there for 47 years, developing the department into a strong research center and working with two additional college presidents during his tenure.

To train farmers to successfully rotate and cultivate the new crops, Carver developed an agricultural extension program for Alabama that was similar to the one at Iowa State.

The American industrialist, farmer, and inventor William C. Edenborn of Winn Parish, Louisiana, grew peanuts on his demonstration farm.

[43] Based on the quality of Carver's presentation at their convention, they asked the African-American professor to testify on the tariff issue before the Ways and Means Committee of the United States House of Representatives.

[43] Southern congressmen mocked him, but as he talked about the importance of the peanut and its uses for American agriculture and manufacturing, committee members repeatedly extended the time for his testimony.

His article, "A Boy Who Was Traded for a Horse" (1932), in The American Magazine, and its 1937 reprint in Reader's Digest, contributed to this myth about Carver's influence.

In 1937, Carver attended two chemurgy conferences, an emerging field in the 1930s, during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, concerned with developing new products from crops.

[49] Carver's background for his interest in organic farming sprouted from his father being killed during the Civil War, and when his mother was kidnapped by Confederate slave raiders.

Although the emancipation allowed Black families 40 acres and a mule, President Johnson revoked this and gave the land to white plantation owners instead.

At age 40, he began a courtship with Sarah L. Hunt, an elementary school teacher and the sister-in-law of Warren Logan, Treasurer of Tuskegee Institute.

[56] Upon returning home one day, Carver suffered a bad fall down a flight of stairs; he was found unconscious by a maid who took him to a hospital.

[64][full citation needed] Carver viewed faith in Jesus Christ as a means of destroying both barriers of racial disharmony and social stratification.

He compiled a list of "eight cardinal virtues" whose possession defines "a lady or a gentleman": Beginning in 1906 at Tuskegee, Carver led a Bible class on Sundays for several students at their request.

Historian Linda O. McMurry noted that he "was a frail and sickly child" who suffered "from a severe case of whooping cough and frequent bouts of what was called croup".

[68] McMurry contested the diagnosis of croup, holding rather that "His stunted growth and apparently impaired vocal cords suggest instead tubercular or pneumococcal infection.

National Basketball Association star David Robinson and his wife, Valerie, founded an academy named after Carver; it opened on September 17, 2001, in San Antonio, Texas.

[86] On February 15, 2005, an episode of Modern Marvels included scenes from within Iowa State University's Food Sciences Building and about Carver's work.

The 12 minutes of footage were taken at the Tuskegee Institute, and includes Carver in his apartment, office and laboratory, as well as scenes of him tending flowers and displaying his paintings.

Mackintosh notes that, "Carver did not explicitly claim that he had personally discovered all the peanut attributes and uses he cited, but he said nothing to prevent his audiences from drawing the inference.

"[89] Carver's research was intended to produce replacements from common crops for commercial products, which were generally beyond the budget of the small one-horse farmer.

This exhaustive system for cultivation, the destruction of forest, the rapid and almost constant decomposition of organic matter, have made our agricultural problem one requiring more brains than of the North, East or West.

The most important was the Carver Penol Company, which sold a mixture of creosote and peanuts as a patent medicine for respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis.

Canadian pharmacist Marcellus Gilmore Edson was awarded U.S. patent 306,727 (for its manufacture) in 1884, 12 years before Carver began his work at Tuskegee.

[101] Carver's records included the following sweet potato products: 73 dyes, 17 wood fillers, 14 candies, 5 library pastes, 5 breakfast foods, 4 starches, 4 flours, and 3 molasses.

Some other individual bulletins dealt with alfalfa, wild plum, tomato, ornamental plants, corn, poultry, dairying, hogs, preserving meats in hot weather, and nature study in schools.