The Plant Doctor

The neighbours called him the plant doctor.

He was only a boy, small and often ill, with a high, soft voice. But if a rose bush was dying or a vegetable patch would not grow, people on the farms around Diamond, Missouri, brought it to him. He had a secret garden in the woods, where he grew plants and studied them for hours. He seemed to know what each one needed.

His name was George, and he had begun his life with almost nothing, not even a family name of his own.

Stolen in the night

George was born into slavery, probably in 1864, on the farm of Moses and Susan Carver in Missouri. Nobody wrote down the date. His mother, Mary, was enslaved by the Carvers.

When George was a baby, raiders came in the night and carried off Mary and her infant son. Moses Carver sent a neighbour after them. The neighbour found the baby, sick and weak, and brought him back. Mary was never found.

Slavery ended in the United States in 1865. George and his older brother, Jim, were raised by Moses and Susan Carver, and took their surname. George was too frail for heavy farm work, so he helped in the house and the garden, and learned to cook, sew and wash. He also taught himself everything he could about plants.

A long road to school

The local school would not take Black children. So when George was about eleven, he walked to the town of Neosho, about ten miles away, to attend a school for Black children there. He slept at first in a barn. A Black couple, Mariah and Andrew Watkins, took him in, and he worked in their house in return.

For years after that he moved from town to town, working as a cook, a laundry worker and a farmhand, and going to school wherever he could.

Once, a college in Kansas accepted him by letter. When he arrived and they saw that he was Black, they turned him away.

He did not give up. In 1890 he enrolled at Simpson College in Iowa, to study art and music; he was a gifted painter of plants and flowers. A teacher there, seeing how much he knew about plants, encouraged him to study science. He moved to Iowa State Agricultural College, where he became its first Black student, and later its first Black teacher. He earned his degree in 1894 and a master's degree in 1896.

The call to Tuskegee

That same year, Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, a college for Black students in Alabama, invited Carver to come and lead its agricultural work. Carver could have stayed in Iowa, where he was respected. He chose to go south, to work among the people who most needed help.

He found that the land was exhausted. For generations the same farms had grown cotton, year after year, and cotton had drained the soil of its goodness. Many of the farmers were poor Black families who had been enslaved, or whose parents had been, and who now rented small plots and sank deeper into debt.

Healing the soil

Carver's answer was simple and patient. He taught farmers to rotate their crops: to grow cotton one year and, in other years, plants such as peanuts, sweet potatoes and cowpeas. These plants put goodness, especially nitrogen, back into the soil. They also gave families food to eat.

Most farmers could not come to the college, so Carver went to them. He loaded a wagon with tools, seeds and samples and drove it from farm to farm, a school on wheels. He also wrote simple leaflets, full of practical advice and recipes, which anyone could read.

But if everyone grew peanuts, who would buy them? So Carver worked in his laboratory to find new uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes. He developed hundreds of products and recipes, from foods to dyes and cosmetics. Contrary to a popular belief, he did not invent peanut butter. He took out only three patents in his life. He mostly wanted his discoveries to be used freely.

A famous man who stayed humble

In 1921 Carver spoke to the United States Congress about the peanut industry. He was given ten minutes. The members were so interested that they let him speak for much longer.

He became famous across America. Inventors and presidents sought his advice. But he lived simply in a room at Tuskegee, wore the same old suits, and often wore a fresh flower in his buttonhole. He gave much of his savings to Tuskegee, to help future students.

George Washington Carver died on 5 January 1943. That year, the place where he was born became a national monument, the first in America to honour a Black American.

Want to read more?

Linda O. McMurry's George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol is a careful biography that separates fact from legend. The National Park Service's George Washington Carver National Monument, at his birthplace, has a helpful website and museum.