George Washington Carver is best known as the inventor of peanut butter. And I love peanut butter. There are always two jars on my shelf, ensuring I never run out, but it seems a fairly obvious invention — grind up peanuts, and spread it on bread, or add jelly. And here’s a secret — a thin layer of peanut butter melted on the meat greatly enhances and improves hamburgers and hot dogs. Seriously!

G W Carrver gave us much more than peanut butter, though. He was a botanist, chemist, and inventor whose work revived the late 19th and early 20th century agricultural economy of the American South.Born in Missouri, the son of slaves, he never knew his parents. His father, who worked on a neighboring plantation, died before Carver was born, and his mother, two of his siblings, and the infant Carver were kidnapped during the Civil War by bushwhackers (Confederate guerrilla warriors). The plantation owner sent two horses as a ransom, but only the relatively worthless infant was sent back to his owner’s plantation — the kidnappers kept Carver’s mother, brother, and sister, and he never saw them again.Missouri was a border state between North and South, where slaves were likely to escape northward or be liberated by Union troops, so after the kidnapping Carver’s owners sent their remaining slaves, including young George, to be held further South in Alabama.When America defeated the treasonous South, George’s former owners, Moses and Susan Carver, sent for the boy’s return, and raised him. He later wrote that he thought of them as Uncle Mose and Aunt Sue. They taught him to read, told him he was “as free as a bird,” and their last name became his own. It goes without saying, this was highly unusual.Carver’s childhood chores were mostly cleaning, cooking, assisting “Aunt Sue” in her garden, and gathering plants from the nearby woods. There his interest in plants was first sparked, and his talent with growing things soon became apparent.

He was unable to attend local schools because of his color, but at about the age of 11 Carver was sent to a nearby town, where he attended a school for ‘colored children’ run by the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency of the US government.A year later, bored with reading, writing, and arithmetic he already knew, young George set out alone for Kansas, where he spent his adolescence working and attending schools in four different towns.In his late teens, his mailed application was accepted to attend what is now Highland Community College in Highland, Kansas, but after making the long journey he was refused admission on account of being black.He then worked at a laundry for several years, and briefly settled in Ness County, Kansas, where he was the area’s first local black homesteader.In 1889 he applied to Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, where he was accepted and attended. After a year at Simpson he transferred to Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University), where he earned his Bachelors and Masters degrees, and then became the school’s first black faculty member.By 1896, Booker T Washington at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) had decided that the all-black school should conduct agricultural research, and Carver, being the world’s only black person with a graduate degree in the subject, was hired. Southern agriculture was in serious decline at the time, the result of many decades of cotton cultivation that had left much of the soil depleted of nitrogen. Carver’s research found that the soil could be revitalized by planting peanuts and soybeans, and advocated crop rotation — growing peanuts one year, cotton the next, etc. This dramatically increased the cotton yield, but left farmers with a surplus of peanuts in alternate years, which sold at a poor price.To solve this new problem, Carver experimented with peanuts and developed more than 300 new uses for the little legume, from cooking oil to cosmetics, wood stain to printers’ ink, peanut cheese, peanut coffee, and yes, peanut butter. Within a few years, the demand for peanuts had grown so much that crop rotation was no longer a financial sacrifice for farmers.Carver’s research rescued the South’s
economy, but when I was a kid, when
he was very, very briefly mentioned in school, “peanut butter” is all we were told. One sentence, maybe a paragraph in the textbook. It’s probably another slight at the man for being black.
He also developed a technique for fighting fungus disease in cherry trees, discovered dozens of new uses for pecans, invented methods to make paints and stains from soybeans, and to make sweet potatoes into flour, starch, synthetic rubber, and more than 100 other products. He made rope from cornstalk fibers, artificial marble from sawdust, carpets from weed fibers, and showed that numerous pigments and paints could be made from such materials as orange peels, coffee grounds, and Alabama’s clay soil.And yet, wanting these products to be affordable and accessible, he generally eschewed filing patents, and held only three.
He published a series of pamphlets extolling new techniques and recipes, and organized an educational wagon that traveled the South, offering advice on practical, sustainable agriculture to farmers, black and white. So yeah, George Washington Carver invented peanut butter. But that’s not a fraction of what the man did.
In Newton County, Missouri, the plantation where he was born has been preserved as the George Washington Carver National Monument. I visited there in the early 2000s, learning most of the above and being absolutely astounded for an entire afternoon.

4/13/2024