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George Washington Carver was the person most responsible for the economic survival of the southern portion of the United States.
He made great contributions to agriculture through his knowledge of science. And story of his life is just as amazing as his long list of achievements. U.S.A. secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace once said of Carver, "He had a creative urge and a sense of destiny that would not let him rest. His creative urge must serve the people who needed it most." George was born in early 1864, in Diamond Grove, Missouri, America. His mother was a slave who worked and lived on a farm owned by Moses and Susan Carver. One night, he and his mother were kidnapped by a group of bandits. Eventually, George was rescued from the kidnappers and was taken back to the farm, where he was brought up by the Carvers. Sadly, George never saw his mum again.  When George was 12, he left the Carver farm to get an education. Although slavery had been abolished, the school nearby would not allow George to study there so George went to a school in Neosho, Missouri. He had to earn money to buy food and clothes so he worked by helping on farms. From then on, George stayed with kind families as he travelled around, going to different schools. He was trying to save enough money to go to college. George wrote lots of letters to different colleges but they wouldn’t let him in because he was African American. It was prejudice at its worst, but George did not let that stop him. It made him even more determined. Finally, at the age of 30, he was accepted at a college in Iowa. There he studied plants (botany), chemistry, animals (zoology) and insects (entomology). When he finished college, George began to teach science at a college called the Tuskegee Institute. George was given lots of land to experiment with and he looked for ways to help local farmers improve their land.  Years of growing cotton and tobacco had left the fields in Southern America in a terrible state. George discovered a way to help. It was called crop rotation and farmers had to plant different crops in their fields every year or so. Click here to find out how George achieved this... The farmers had so many leftover peanuts and sweet potatoes that they didn’t know what to do with them.So what do you think happened? 1) The farmers came up with many ways of using the products:  OR 2) George went to his laboratory at Tuskegee and started experimenting. Of course this is the correct answer and George developed over 300 products that could be made from peanuts, including cheese, milk, coffee, flour, ink, and soap. He also developed 118 products from sweet potatoes, including flour, vinegar, rubber, and glue. Although he did hold three patents to make him money, George never patented most of the many discoveries he made while at Tuskegee, saying "God gave them to me, how can I sell them to someone else?" Many famous scientists and inventors wanted to give George a job, including Thomas Edison, who offered him a hundred thousand pounds to come and work for him, and Henry Ford. George did not accept any of these offers and stayed at Tuskegee for the rest of his life. In those years, he received many honours and in 1940, he gave his savings to set up the Carver Research Foundation, which helped people continue scientific research. George died on January 5, 1943. The area of his childhood in Missouri, is now a park and was the first monument in memory of an African American in the USA. George Washington Carver will always be remembered as a man who against all the odds used education to help himself and to help the poor people, black and white, of the Southern USA. His philosophy of success was: "It is not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank, that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success."
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