George Washington Carver, 1942 by Betsy Graves Reyneau, Oil on canvas
Originally uploaded by cliff1066™
George Washington Carver was born in Missouri, one year before the abolition of slavery in the Unites States of America, in 1865.
One night, raiders attacked his family and stole George and his mother away. He was later found unharmed and sold to back to his owners, in exchange for a race horse.
He was a sickly child at birth and would remain frail throughout most of his childhood. Due to this, he could not do the hard, manual labour on the farm. So he developed an avid interest in plants.
The young Carver had his own little garden in the woods and would soon become known as the Plant Doctor - as he developed various concoctions of herbs to heal various sicknesses.
His formal education began at age 12, due to the fact that he had tried getting into normal schools, but was denied, due to his skin color - he was black.
(Flick photo, entitled, "The Boy Carver Statue", by J Stephen Conn. Please read the caption beneath the "Boy Carver Statue" link).
Additionally, no black school was available where he lived in Missouri, so he moved away from
his adoptive parents - Moses and Sarah Carver, to Southern Missouri, where he went to school in a one-room schoolhouse. He supported himself by working the farm.
He then moved with another family to Kansas. But he was denied entry to Highland University due to his skin colour.
He was, however, accepted into Simpson College in Iowa, where he studied art. He was a natural talent, but his passion for science led him to transfer from Simpson to Iowa Agricultural College (now known as Iowa State university).
He distinguished himself so much after graduation (in 1894), that he was invited to join their faculty - the first black man to be accorded that honour.
(Friends, we have to realize that at that time, it was thought that a black man was inferior to a white man and accordingly, did not have the intellectual capacity of a white person. So this was quite an achievement for the young George Carver).
There, he was given the freedom to work in agriculture and botany in the university's greenhouses.
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According to article, "George Washington Carver", Ideafinder.com:
In 1895, Carver co-authored a series of papers on the prevention and cures for fungus diseases affecting cherry plants. He received his Master's degree in Agriculture in 1896 and in 1897, discovered two fungi that would be named after him.
Later that year, Booker T. Washington, renown black politician and founder of the Tuskegee Institute, convinced Carver to come South and serve as the school's Director of Agriculture.
At Tuskegee, Carver developed his crop rotation method, which alternated nitrate producing legumes-such as peanuts and peas-with cotton, which depletes soil of its nutrients. Following Carver's lead, Southern farmers soon began planting peanuts one year and cotton the next.
While many of the peanuts were used to feed livestock, large surpluses quickly developed. Carver then developed 325 different uses for the extra peanuts.
These included cooking oil, printers ink, cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, nitro-glycerin and gasoline.
He also discovered that the sweet potato and the pecan also enriched depleted soils.
Carver found almost 20 uses for these crops, including synthetic rubber and material for paving highways.
Although the farmers were ecstatic with the tremendous quality of cotton and tobacco that they grew (they later grew tobacco), they quickly became angry because the amount of peanuts they harvested was too plentiful and began to rot in overflowing warehouses.
Suddenly, the same farmers who cursed Carver, now found that a new industry had sprung up that could use their surplus peanuts. Next, Carver looked at ways of utilizing the sweet potato and was able to develop more than 115 products from it including flour, starch and synthetic rubber (the United States Army utilized many of his products during World War I)".
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In summary, George Washington Carver invented the crop rotation method and over 300 products made from peanuts, 100 from sweet potatoes and 75 from pecans, for use in the home and on the farm.
He received three (3) patents during 1925-1927:1925: Patent no. 1,522,176 (US) for Cosmetics and Producing the Same issued January 6,1925
1925: Patent no. 1,541,478 (US) for Paint and Stain and Producing the Same issued June 9, 1925
1927: Patent no. 1,632,365 (US) for Producing Paints and Stains issued June 14, 1927.
In 1940 he donated over US $60,000 of his life's savings to his foundation - the George Washington Carver Foundation. He also willed the rest of his estate to the organization, so that his work might continue after his death.
He died on January 5, 1943 on the campus of Tuskegee Institute.
Upon his death, George Washington Carver was honored by various levels of the US State and Federal Government as well as by foreign leaders, worldwide. The US government also designated the farmland upon which he grew, as a national monument.
(Flickr photo of the Moses & Susan Carver House by J. Stephen Conn).
In 1946, they recognized January 5th, the day of his death, as George Washington Carver Recognition Day, as his birth day is unknown.
It is still a national holiday in the USA.
(I would like to thank cliff1066™ for the use of his photo, entitled, "George Washington Carver, 1942 by Betsy Graves Reyneau, Oil on canvas").
Gillian
Sources Include
1) Article, "George Washington Carver", Wikipedia.org, accessed February 26,2010
2) Article, "Slavery in the Unites States",Wikipedia.org, accessed March 1, 2010
3) Article, "George Washington Carver" - Ideafinder.com, accessed March 1, 2010
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