[Posted Feb. 20, 2008]

Great Inventor:
George Washington Carter

By Leonard E. Colvin
Chief Reporter
New Journal & Guide

     The nation’s first designated national monument to an African American was dedicated in Missouri on July 14, 1945 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The honoree: George Washington Carver, a noted agricultural chemist who was born into slavery in 1864. When Carver died in 1943,  he left behind a legacy of agricultural  inventions and innovations which would rescue the nation’s agricultural economy during the height of the Great Depression.

George Washington Carver

       Carver’s extensive inventory included products made from peanuts, pecans, and sweet potatoes. He transformed them into a variety of products, including breakfast foods, sauces, axle grease, rubber products and extensive dyes. Perhaps his most famous creation is the popular peanut butter, a favorite sandwich spread for generations of youth, especially.
       Carver invented salted peanuts, pancake flour, peanut-flavored ice cream, punches from fruits like cherries, and pineapples, as well as hand lotion, vanishing creams, and shampoo.  The list includes oil for the scalp, antiseptic soaps or dyes for leather, clothes, wood stains and paints, or colored writing paper, glue, metal polish, printer’s ink and linoleum.
       A trained agricultural chemist, Carter discovered three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more uses for soybeans, pecans and yams.
       Although his name and contributions have never been associated with many inventions and innovations, his extensive inventions revived America’s agricultural economy during the 1930s  when the nation was in the grips of the Great Depression.

    Dr. Dennis R. Keeney, emeritus professor of  agronomy at Iowa State University, said Carver is still highly regarded in Iowa, where he  was trained and began his  work in agronomy. Keeney has traveled to conferences to Tuskegee, to observe his legacy first hand.
       “He still haunts that school,” Keeney said. “His work was geared toward uplifting the small tenant farmers who were competing against the large industrial farming operations which were being developed and threatened their livelihood.
“Carver wanted to help these poor small farmers develop alternative crops so they could rely less on cotton and  tobacco which actually hurt the soil. He was way ahead of his time in many ways,” Keeney said.
       For decades southern farmers relied on cotton and tobacco as their main cash crops.  But the continued use of these two crops eroded the minerals in the soil and destroyed, especially, southern farmers from producing healthy, money-making harvests.

   The economy of the United States at that time was heavily dependent  upon agriculture and slave labor, especially in the South. The agribusiness of the South had been devastated by the Civil War.
       In 1897,  Booker T. Washington recruited Carver from Iowa University, where he was working as an agriculturalist, to run the Agricultural Department of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.  Tuskegee Institute was the leading center of training for African Americans in the South at the time.

 
    
       Carver had developed a system of yearly alternating or rotating crops  to allow the soil to replenish  its ability to nurture the crops planted in it. Instead of planting cotton each year, Carver wrote pamphlets on crop rotation and reinvigorating soil depleted by cotton.
      He educated the small white southern farmers about alternating the traditional cotton and tobacco crops with soil enriching  peanuts, peas, soybeans, sweet potatoes and pecan plants.
       By the late 1940s, the southern agricultural-based economy had recovered and become profitable. Thanks in part to crops Carver developed for industrial uses,  farmers across the South and North became more profitable.
       During WWI, he found a way to replace the textile dyes formerly imported from Europe. He produced 500 different shades of dyes and was responsible for the invention in 1927 of a process for producing paints and stains from soybeans. Carver received three distinct patents for his work in this area.
       Carver also worked closely with Henry Ford. Carver converted soybeans into plastics for automobiles. Collaborating with Henry Ford on using peanut and corn oil to power automobile engines, he helped to create Ethanol,which is being considered as an alternative to petroleum-based fuels.
       A modest man, Carter did not patent or profit from most of his innovative work. At one point, Thomas Edison offered to hire Carver. But Carver refused a $100,000 salary offered by Edison and remained at Tuskegee.
       George Washington Carter was born in 1864 near Diamond Grove, Missouri on the farm of Moses Carver.  He was born at the time when slavery was nearly over, during the last full year of the Civil War.
        Confederate night-raiders kidnapped Carver, who was an infant, and his mother and transported them to Arkansas.  Moses Carver found and reclaimed George Washington Carver after the war, but his  mother had disappeared.
       Moses and Susan Carver raised George as one of  their own sons. It was on the Carver farm that young George acquired his fascination with nature, where he earned the nickname “the plant doctor”, collecting many rocks and plants.
       At age 12 he began his formal education which required him to leave the home of his adopted parents. Schools were segregated by race at that time with no school available for black students near Carver’s home. 
He later moved to Newton County in southwest Missouri. There he worked as a farm hand and studied in a one-room schoolhouse. He went on to attend Minneapolis High school in Kansas. College entrance was a struggle, again because of racial barriers.
        When he was 30-year-old. Carter was admitted to Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, where he was he first black student. Carver had to study piano and art because college didn’t offer science classes. Intent on a science career, he transferred to Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) in 1891, where he gained a B.A. degree in 1894 and a master’s of science degree in bacterial botany and agriculture in 1897. 
     Carver became a member of the faculty of the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanics (the first black faculty member for Iowa College) teaching classes about soil conservation and chemurgy.
     On July 14, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt honored Carver with a national monument dedicated to his accomplishments. The area of Carver’s childhood near Diamond Grove, Missouri is preserved as a park, this park was the first designated national monument to an African American in the United States.

 

To read other stories, subscribe to the New Journal and Guide.