George Washington Carver
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50 free George Washington Carver trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
George Washington Carver is one of the best-known scientists in American history, and one of the most misunderstood. Most people can name the crop he championed, but far fewer know how a sickly child born enslaved on a frontier farm made himself into a botanist, painter, teacher and adviser to industrialists and politicians. This quiz follows his whole story: the dangerous first months of his life, the long search for a school that would take him, his decades of teaching at Tuskegee, the farm bulletins and traveling lessons that carried his ideas to struggling growers, and the myths that grew up around his laboratory. It also covers the ships, coins, monuments and other tributes that bear his name. The questions suit students, teachers planning a Black History Month lesson, and trivia fans who want more than the usual one-line summary. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will finish knowing the man as well as the legend.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which food made from his signature crop is George Washington Carver often wrongly credited with inventing?
Peanut butter
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.
Q 02Time magazine in 1941 dubbed George Washington Carver a 'Black' version of which Renaissance figure?
Leonardo
Leonardo fit because Carver painted as well as experimented. One of his canvases had hung at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.
Q 03A crater named for George Washington Carver in 1970 sits on which body in the solar system?
The Moon
The Moon carries the Carver crater on its far side, the hemisphere that can never be seen from Earth.
Q 04Which San Antonio Spurs star and his wife founded an academy named for George Washington Carver in 2001?
David Robinson
David Robinson and his wife Valerie opened the school in San Antonio, and in 2012 it became a tuition-free public charter school.
Q 05Which carmaker paid for an elevator in George Washington Carver's Tuskegee dormitory as his health declined?
Henry Ford
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.
Q 06Which singer and film star launched the Liberty ship SS George Washington Carver at a California shipyard in 1943?
Lena Horne
Lena Horne swung the champagne bottle before a crowd at the Richmond shipyards. From keel to delivery, the ship took only 42 days.
Q 07Which future president, then a senator, sponsored the 1943 bill creating the George Washington Carver National Monument?
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman represented Carver's home state in the Senate, and his bill passed both houses of Congress unanimously.
Q 08George Washington Carver was born into slavery on a farm near Diamond Grove in which state?
Missouri
Missouri never left the Union, so the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply there and slavery lasted in the state until 1865.
Q 09After raiders kidnapped the infant George Washington Carver, what did farmer Moses Carver give up to recover him?
A prize horse
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.
Q 10What nickname did neighbors give the young George Washington Carver, in whose care sickly flowers and shrubs revived?
The Plant Doctor
The Plant Doctor kept a secret garden hidden in the brush, because people around him thought time spent on flowers was foolishness.
Q 11Which first principal of the Tuskegee Institute recruited George W. Carver in 1896 to lead its agriculture department?
Booker T. Washington
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.
Q 12Besides peanuts, which root crop did George Washington Carver turn into flour, vinegar, writing ink and paints?
Sweet potato
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.
Q 13Which soil nutrient do peanuts and cowpeas restore to cotton-worn fields, as George Washington Carver taught farmers?
Nitrogen
Q 21Which basic fact about himself did George Washington Carver, born enslaved in the 1860s, never know for certain?
His date of birth
His date of birth went unrecorded because enslaved people were treated as property, and Carver himself usually said it was about 1865.
Q 22Why did George Carver add the middle initial W while living in Minneapolis, Kansas?
A namesake kept getting his mail
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.
Q 23What kind of home did George Washington Carver build for himself on his Kansas homestead claim in the 1880s?
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.
Q 14Which cotton-destroying insect of the early 1900s made George Washington Carver's push for other crops more urgent?
Boll weevil
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.
Q 15Where was George Washington Carver the first Black student and, later, the first Black faculty member?
Iowa State
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.
Q 16In the 1930s, George Washington Carver drew crowds with peanut-oil massages offered as a treatment for which disease?
Polio
Polio patients did seem to regain some movement, but researchers later concluded that the massage itself helped, not the oil.
Q 17Which instrument did George Washington Carver study alongside art when he enrolled at an Indianola college in 1890?
Piano
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.
Q 18Which Methodist college in Indianola admitted George Washington Carver in 1890 after a Kansas school turned him away?
Simpson
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.
Q 19Which art teacher, doubting a Black painter could earn a living, steered George Washington Carver toward botany?
Etta Budd
Etta Budd pushed him to enroll at the agricultural college in Ames, where her own father taught horticulture.
Q 20Which Neosho midwife and herbalist took in the young George Washington Carver while he attended school there?
Mariah Watkins
Mariah Watkins also renamed him: when he introduced himself as Carver's George, she replied that from now on he was George Carver.
A sod house
A sod house was his base in Ness County, where he also planted 800 forest trees and kept a conservatory of 500 specimens.
Q 24How did George Washington Carver support himself during his first weeks as an art student in Indianola?
Running a laundry
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.
Q 25George Washington Carver's best-known painting, shown at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, depicts which pair of plants?
Yucca and cactus
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.
Q 26Before which House committee did George Washington Carver testify in 1921 in support of a tariff on imported peanuts?
Ways and Means
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.
Q 27Cheap peanut imports from which country led US growers to seek the 1922 tariff that George Washington Carver backed?
China
China was undercutting American prices by 1920, and the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 duly put a duty on imported peanuts.
Q 28Which annual NAACP award for outstanding achievement by a Black American went to George Washington Carver in 1923?
Spingarn Medal
The Spingarn Medal honored his laboratory work at Tuskegee, and arrived two years after his testimony to Congress had made him famous.
Q 29Which British learned body made George Washington Carver a member in 1916, a rare honor for an American?
Royal Society of Arts
Royal Society of Arts membership came five years before his testimony to Congress made him a household name in his own country.
Q 30The National Park Service credits George Washington Carver with 75 products derived from which tree nut?
Pecans
Pecans came well behind his headline crop: the same tally lists 325 uses for peanuts, from chili sauce to shaving cream.