GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER By Shayla James
Nearing the end of the Civil War between 1864 and 1865 in Diamond Grove Missouri, a slave woman owned by Moses and Susan Carver gave birth to a baby boy named George. George Washington Carver was born into slavery but being that the war ended in 1865, he didn’t remain a slave for long. He lived his life as a free man and he took full advantage of it. Carver received a formal high school education in Kansas, became the first African American to attend the Iowa State Agricultural College, and later went on to teach and continue his studies at the Tuskegee Institute. While George worked to help improve the South’s agricultural-based economy, he studied agricultural science and botany. He realized that centuries of cotton and tobacco growing had depleted the quality and fertility of southern soil. So he proposed growing peanuts, a legume, to help nourish the soil. Although he was known as ‘the peanut guy’, he also encouraged the growth of peas, soybeans, sweet potatoes, and pecans. Carver created hundreds of products using peanuts such as soap, lotion, nitroglycerin, leather dyes, paint, paper, glue, diesel fuel, and even plastics. He was born George Carver, a little slave boy, but he died George Carver the great American Agricultural Scientist.
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