Childhood:
Born a slave in the spring of 1864 in
Diamond Grove, Missouri, Carver was only an infant when he and his
mother were abducted from his owner's plantation by a band of slave
raiders. His mother was sold and shipped away, but Carver was ransomed
by his master in exchange 
for a race horse. While working as a farm
hand, Carver managed to obtain a high school education. He was admitted
as the first black student of
Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa. He then
attended Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) where,
while working as the school janitor, he received a degree in
agricultural science in 1894. Two years later he received a master's
degree from the same school
and became the first African American to
serve on its faculty. Within a short time his fame spread, and Booker
T. Washington offered him a post
at Tuskegee.
Adolescence:
George Carver nearly starved before he found a job in Fort Scott
. When he did find one,
as a cook in a private residence, it did not leave him time to attend
school. He lived in a tiny room under the back steps of the house, and
saved every penny of his meager wages. As soon as he thought he had
enough to carry him through a term of school, he quit the job as a
cook. He rented a lean-to behind the stagecoach depot for a dollar a
week, and enrolled at a big
brick 
school which taught subjects he had
never even heard of before. He allowed himself a dollar a week for food
and bought almost nothing else.
He studied by candlelight far into each
night, and he read every book, pamphlet, and newspaper he could
acquire. By the end of the
term he was penniless. He worked all summer
washing and ironing bed linen for the hotel and doing laundry for
businessmen and ranchers who
came and went by stagecoach. By fall, he
had enough money saved to go back to school.
Early
Adulthood:
He began 
his formal education at the age
of twelve, which required
him to leave the home of his adopted parents. Schools segregated by
race at
that time with no school available for black students near Carver's
home. He
moved to Newton County in Southwest Missouri, where 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.
In 1897,
Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial
Institute
for Negroes, convinced Carver to come south and serve as the school's
Director
of Agriculture. Carver remained on the faculty until his death in 1943.
(Read
the pamphlet - Help For Hard
Times - written by Carver and
forwarded by Booker T. Washington as an example
of the educational material provided to farmers by Carver.)
Word spread
around Diamond Grove that "Carver's George
" had a magic way with growing things, and people began calling him the
Plant Doctor. He made house calls, either prescribing remedies for
ailing plants or taking them to his secret garden in the woods where he
tenderly nursed them. His "magic" with growing things was largely the
result of his patient testing of different combinations of sand, loam
and clay as potting soil for various plants, his experimentation with
different amounts of sunlight and water, and his tracking down of
damaging insects and the like. When the Carver's finest apple tree
began withering, George
crawled along
its limbs until he found some on which colonies of codling moths had
taken up residence. "Saw off those branches," he told Moses Carver , "and the tree will get
well." And it did.
Adulthood
and Career:
In
1896 he became director of the Department of Agricultural Research at
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University),
where he began an exhaustive series of experiments with peanuts. Carver
developed several hundred industrial uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes,
and soybeans
and
developed a new type of cotton known as Carver's
hybrid. His discoveries induced southern farmers to raise other crops
in addition to cotton. He also taught methods of soil improvement.
Carver went
on
from peanuts to produce such things as paving blocks from cotton and
rubber
from sludge. In collaboration with Henry
Ford, he perfected a process for extracting rubber
from the
milk of the goldenrod. On the experimental farm at Tuskegee, he developed
several new strains
of cotton, the most important of which was "Carver's Hybrid," a cross
between short-stalk cotton -- it had fatter boils but many were
near
enough to the ground to be ruined by rain splashed sand -- and
tall-stalk
cotton. The hybrid had the better characteristics of both, and he
evolved
strains of vegetables that were finer in quality and larger in size
than had
been grown before.
In recognition
of his
accomplishments, Carver was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1923 by the
National Association for the Advancement of Color ed People. In
1935 he
was appointed collaborator in the Division of Plant Mycology and
Disease Survey of the Bureau of Plant Industry o f the U.S. Department
of Agriculture. In 1940 he donated all his savings to the establishment
of the George Washington Carver Foundation at Tuskegee for research in
natural science.
Lasting
Impact:
George Washington
Carver was bestowed an honorary doctorate from Simpson College in 1928. He was an
honorary member of
the Royal Society of Arts in London, England. In 1923, he
received the Spingarn Medal
given every year by the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored
People. In 1939, he received the Roosevelt medal for
restoring southern
agriculture. On July
14, 1943, U.S. President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt
honored Carver with a national monument dedicated to his
accomplishments. The
area of Carver's childhood near Diamond
Grove, Missouri preserved as a
park, this park was the
first designated national monument to an African American in the United States.
Major
portions of the above text
were directly copied from public domain documents found on the internet.
I have listed those Internet
Addresses beneath for you convenience.
