50 Fun Facts About George Washington Carver

Which food made from his signature crop is George Washington Carver often wrongly credited with inventing?

Peanut butter had been patented in 1884, twelve years before Carver began work at Tuskegee. His famous 1916 bulletin gathered existing recipes for the crop.

Time magazine in 1941 dubbed George Washington Carver a 'Black' version of which Renaissance figure?

Leonardo fit because Carver painted as well as experimented. One of his canvases had hung at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.

A crater named for George Washington Carver in 1970 sits on which body in the solar system?

The Moon carries the Carver crater on its far side, the hemisphere that can never be seen from Earth.

Which San Antonio Spurs star and his wife founded an academy named for George Washington Carver in 2001?

David Robinson and his wife Valerie opened the school in San Antonio, and in 2012 it became a tuition-free public charter school.

Which carmaker paid for an elevator in George Washington Carver's Tuskegee dormitory as his health declined?

Henry Ford became a close friend after inviting Carver to speak in Dearborn in 1937. He later built a replica there of the cabin where the scientist was born.

Which singer and film star launched the Liberty ship SS George Washington Carver at a California shipyard in 1943?

Lena Horne swung the champagne bottle before a crowd at the Richmond shipyards. From keel to delivery, the ship took only 42 days.

Which future president, then a senator, sponsored the 1943 bill creating the George Washington Carver National Monument?

Harry S. Truman represented Carver's home state in the Senate, and his bill passed both houses of Congress unanimously.

George Washington Carver was born into slavery on a farm near Diamond Grove in which state?

Missouri never left the Union, so the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply there and slavery lasted in the state until 1865.

After raiders kidnapped the infant George Washington Carver, what did farmer Moses Carver give up to recover him?

A prize horse was the price of the baby's return, and his mother Mary was never found. A 1932 magazine profile was titled A Boy Who Was Traded for a Horse.

What nickname did neighbors give the young George Washington Carver, in whose care sickly flowers and shrubs revived?

The Plant Doctor kept a secret garden hidden in the brush, because people around him thought time spent on flowers was foolishness.

Which first principal of the Tuskegee Institute recruited George W. Carver in 1896 to lead its agriculture department?

Booker T. Washington lured him with a salary more than double the faculty average and two dormitory rooms, one of them just for his specimens.

Besides peanuts, which root crop did George Washington Carver turn into flour, vinegar, writing ink and paints?

Sweet potato harvests on one small test plot at Tuskegee rose from 40 bushels to 266 within a few years under his soil-building methods.

Which soil nutrient do peanuts and cowpeas restore to cotton-worn fields, as George Washington Carver taught farmers?

Nitrogen is pulled from the air by bacteria living in nodules on the roots of these plants, so rotating them fed the next cotton crop without costly fertilizer.

Which cotton-destroying insect of the early 1900s made George Washington Carver's push for other crops more urgent?

Boll weevil damage changed the South so much that Enterprise, Alabama, raised a monument to the pest in 1919 for forcing its farmers to diversify.

Where was George Washington Carver the first Black student and, later, the first Black faculty member?

Iowa State put him in charge of its greenhouse while he earned his master's degree, and his professors wanted him to stay on and teach.

In the 1930s, George Washington Carver drew crowds with peanut-oil massages offered as a treatment for which disease?

Polio patients did seem to regain some movement, but researchers later concluded that the massage itself helped, not the oil.

Which instrument did George Washington Carver study alongside art when he enrolled at an Indianola college in 1890?

Piano was more than a pastime for him: he is remembered as an accomplished pianist as well as a painter whose work reached the 1893 World's Fair.

Which Methodist college in Indianola admitted George Washington Carver in 1890 after a Kansas school turned him away?

Simpson College took every qualified applicant regardless of race, and Carver later wrote that the people there made him believe he was a real human being.

Which art teacher, doubting a Black painter could earn a living, steered George Washington Carver toward botany?

Etta Budd pushed him to enroll at the agricultural college in Ames, where her own father taught horticulture.

Which Neosho midwife and herbalist took in the young George Washington Carver while he attended school there?

Mariah Watkins also renamed him: when he introduced himself as Carver's George, she replied that from now on he was George Carver.

Which basic fact about himself did George Washington Carver, born enslaved in the 1860s, never know for certain?

His date of birth went unrecorded because enslaved people were treated as property, and Carver himself usually said it was about 1865.

Why did George Carver add the middle initial W while living in Minneapolis, Kansas?

A namesake kept getting his mail, so he picked a letter at random. He never used Washington as a middle name himself and signed as George W. Carver.

What kind of home did George Washington Carver build for himself on his Kansas homestead claim in the 1880s?

A sod house was his base in Ness County, where he also planted 800 forest trees and kept a conservatory of 500 specimens.

How did George Washington Carver support himself during his first weeks as an art student in Indianola?

Running a laundry barely fed him at first: by his own account he lived for a month on prayer, beef suet and cornmeal until word of his need spread.

George Washington Carver's best-known painting, shown at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, depicts which pair of plants?

Yucca and cactus caught his eye on the plains of western Kansas, and the canvas is one of the few to survive a 1947 fire at the Carver Museum.

Before which House committee did George Washington Carver testify in 1921 in support of a tariff on imported peanuts?

Ways and Means members kept extending his time as he unpacked one sample after another, and the appearance made him nationally famous as the Peanut Man.

Cheap peanut imports from which country led US growers to seek the 1922 tariff that George Washington Carver backed?

China was undercutting American prices by 1920, and the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 duly put a duty on imported peanuts.

Which annual NAACP award for outstanding achievement by a Black American went to George Washington Carver in 1923?

The Spingarn Medal honored his laboratory work at Tuskegee, and arrived two years after his testimony to Congress had made him famous.

Which British learned body made George Washington Carver a member in 1916, a rare honor for an American?

Royal Society of Arts membership came five years before his testimony to Congress made him a household name in his own country.

The National Park Service credits George Washington Carver with 75 products derived from which tree nut?

Pecans came well behind his headline crop: the same tally lists 325 uses for peanuts, from chili sauce to shaving cream.

What name did George Washington Carver give the mobile classroom he launched in 1906 to carry lessons to farmers?

Jesup wagon honored Morris K. Jesup, the New York financier who paid for it. A truck later took over the route as the Movable School.

George Washington Carver's first Tuskegee farm bulletin, in 1898, advised feeding which free woodland food to livestock?

Acorns cost nothing, which was the point: his bulletins showed poor farmers how to get by without buying feed or commercial fertilizer.

From which material dug from Alabama's ground did George Washington Carver make cheap paints for poor farmers' homes?

Clay gave farmers paint at no cost, and Carver later patented two paint and stain processes of his own in the 1920s.

Which needlecraft did George Washington Carver practice all his life, leaving lace edgings now preserved at Tuskegee?

Crochet samples of his, mostly lace edgings and doilies, went on show at the Carver Museum in 1941. As a student he had also knitted his own socks and mittens.

What accident at his Tuskegee home led to George Washington Carver's death in January 1943?

A fall down stairs left him with complications he never recovered from, and he was buried on campus beside the man who had hired him.

What weekly gathering did George Washington Carver lead at Tuskegee from 1906, acting out the stories for students?

A Bible class met on Sundays at the students' own request, and Carver saw no conflict between his faith and his work in the laboratory.

What was unusual about the 1937 amateur footage of George Washington Carver added to the National Film Registry in 2019?

It was shot in color by C. Allen Alexander, a surgeon, and shows Carver in his laboratory, tending flowers and displaying his paintings.

George Washington Carver is called the father of which movement to turn farm crops into industrial products?

Chemurgy was first publicized as a word in 1934, decades after Carver began making paints, dyes and other goods from crops in his Tuskegee laboratory.

From 1951 to 1954, the US Mint struck which commemorative coin bearing George Washington Carver's portrait?

A half dollar was the format, and it proved to be the last of the classic US commemorative coins. Its backers pitched it partly as a stand against communism.

What type of US Navy vessel, launched in 1965, carried the name USS George Washington Carver?

A nuclear submarine armed with Polaris missiles, she was the last of 14 such boats built at Newport News and served until 1993.

Which future US vice president was tutored in botany as a child by the student George Washington Carver in Ames?

Henry A. Wallace caught his interest in plants from those lessons, and went on to found a hugely successful hybrid corn company before entering politics.

Which illness had nearly killed the infant George Washington Carver by the time he was returned to the Carver farm?

Whooping cough left him so frail that the family physician predicted he would never live to see 21, a forecast he outlived by nearly six decades.

Taphrina carveri and Metasphaeria carveri, species named for George Washington Carver, are what kind of organism?

Fungi were his specialty as a graduate student, and the diseased-crop specimens he collected are now held in herbaria around the world.

What did George Washington Carver do with nearly $60,000 of his life savings in his final years?

He funded a research foundation at Tuskegee to carry on agricultural research after his death. He could afford to because he had lived frugally in a campus dormitory.

The peanut that made George Washington Carver famous ripens underground but belongs to which family of crops?

Legumes usually fruit in the open air, but the peanut buries its pods to ripen, which is why Linnaeus gave it a species name meaning under the earth.

Where did George Washington Carver and his students find equipment for his first, unfunded laboratory at Tuskegee?

Trash heaps supplied the gear because the school was short on funds, a habit of reuse that has been called an early example of recycling.

Which US president approved the 1943 act of Congress creating the George Washington Carver National Monument?

Franklin Roosevelt set aside $30,000 for the site that July, even though wartime rules had banned spending of that kind.

Which schoolbook did the young George Washington Carver say he almost knew by heart on the Carver farm?

Webster's spelling book was nearly all the schooling he had before he left the farm as a boy for a school for Black children in Neosho.

What object did the young George Washington Carver say a dream showed him stuck in a half-eaten watermelon?

A pocketknife was what he had been wishing for, and he said he found one the next morning. He counted it the first of many revelations.

The nine-foot bronze statue at the George Washington Carver National Monument shows him at what stage of life?

Sculptor Robert Amendola portrayed him in boyhood, on a large limestone rock at the farm where he first studied nature.