George Washington Carver guarded his image carefully. While he did not write extensively about his youth, he did leave behind snippets describing his hard early years. These writings tell of a poor orphan who sought knowledge and hungered for scientific discovery but who was sickly and weak. Carver's early years were indeed difficult, but he seems to have exaggerated his frailty. For example, in an autobiographical sketch he wrote in 1897, just as he was beginning his teaching career at the Tuskegee Institute, Carver claimed that when he was a child his "body was very feble [sic] and it was a constant warfare between life and death to see who would gain the mastery." Two paragraphs later comes this sentence: "Day after day I spent in the woods alone in order to collect my floral beautis [sic] and put them in my little garden…"²

In a 1922 sketch Carver wrote "I was born in Diamond Grove, Mo., about the close of the great Civil War, in a little one-roomed log shanty, on the home of Mr. Moses Carver, a German by birth and the owner of my mother, my father being the property of Mr. Grant, who owned the adjoining plantation."³ Carver was never clear about when he was born: sometimes writing "about 1865," or "near the end of the war," or "just as freedom was declared." Since Missouri never seceded from the Union, and thus was not in rebellion when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, slavery continued in the state until the adoption of a new constitution on July 4, 1865. So Carver was most certainly born a slave, probably in the spring of 1865.⁴

Carver's mother Mary was purchased as a thirteen-year-old girl in 1855 when Moses Carver decided that the need for help on his 240 acre farm trumped his antislavery views. The youngster knew neither of his parents since his father was killed in an accident before his birth and his mother disappeared under somewhat mysterious circumstances. When Carver was an infant his mother and he were kidnapped by one of the many bands of bushwhackers roaming Missouri during the turbulent Civil War era. A neighbor of Moses Carver was hired to find them, but succeeded only in recovering George, at the cost of one of Moses' finest horses. This meant that the young George would be raised by Moses and Susan Carver on their farm in Newton County, Missouri. Carver spent much of his boyhood assisting Susan with domestic chores, since his fragility apparently meant he could not help Moses with the farm chores. As a boy, Carver learned how to cook, mend, do laundry, and embroider. He also developed an interest in plants and helped Susan with the garden.

The youngster had a keen desire to learn, first by exploring the flora and fauna on Moses Carver's farm and by devouring Webster's Elementary Spelling Book, which "I almost knew… by heart."⁵ At the age of eleven, Carver left the farm and traveled eight miles to the county seat of Neosho to attend a school for blacks. For the first time, Carver was in a predominantly African American environment. Previously, he had lived on the Carvers' farm in relative isolation; he had grown used to solitude and had developed a love of nature. Moses and Susan Carver had served as surrogate parents. But while he continued to return to the farm on weekends, he never lived permanently with the Carvers again.

In Neosho Carver acquired a set of black "parents," Mariah and Andrew Watkins. He lived in the Watkins' modest three-room house in exchange for helping with household tasks such as laundry. Mariah Watkins appears to have had great influence on her 11-year-old charge. She was a midwife and nurse who had wide knowledge of medicinal herbs, and she was deeply religious. Her influence and the rather eclectic introduction he had had to religion at a little church a mile from the Carver farm imparted in young George a deeply felt but unorthodox and nondenominational faith and a belief in divine revelation. He later testified to the number of revelations he had received, recalling the first as a child when his wish for a pocketknife was answered in a dream in which he had a vision of a knife sticking out a half-eaten watermelon. The next morning, the young Carver found his pocketknife.⁶

Carver was eager to learn, but his first stab at formal school proved disappointing since the schoolmaster at the Neosho knew little more than he did. Not satisfied with basic literacy, Carver decided to move west in the late 1870s, joining blacks disillusioned by the failure of Reconstruction in a vast migration to Kansas. For the next decade or so, Carver shuttled among numerous Midwestern communities, attending school fitfully, trying his luck at homesteading for a time, and surviving by using the domestic skills he had learned from Susan Carver and Mariah Watkins.

Sometime in the late 1880s Carver's wanderings brought him to Winterset, Iowa, where he met the Milhollands, a white couple who profoundly influenced his life and who he later credited with encouraging him to pursue higher education. The Milhollands urged Carver to enroll in nearby Simpson College. Carver was hesitant; his one previous attempt at higher education resulted in racial humiliation. He had applied to Highland College in Kansas and had been accepted, sight unseen. When he showed up to register at the all-white college, an official said his acceptance had been a mistake as the school had never admitted a black and had no intention to do so. Carver was reluctant to be rejected again.

But the Milhollands persisted and Carver eventually entered Simpson College, a small Methodist school in Indianola, Iowa, that admitted all qualified applicants, regardless of race or ethnicity. One black had attended the school before Carver, and there were three Asians still on campus. The school's Methodist affiliation fostered a deepening of Carver's faith and piety, and the school's open policy had a profound affect on his developing self-identity: "They made me believe I was a real human being," he later wrote.⁷ While at Simpson, Carver studied grammar, arithmetic, etymology, voice, and piano. But his main interest was in art, especially painting, in which he had dabbled as a young man. His teacher, Etta Budd, was at first dubious of Carver's talents, and although she changed her perception of him as an artist, she was skeptical about the chances of a black man earning a living as an artist. When she learned of his interest in plants, Budd encouraged Carver to study botany and pushed him to enroll at Iowa State, the agricultural college in Ames, where her father taught horticulture.

Budd's suggestion evidently posed a dilemma for Carver. He loved painting, but he shared her doubts about his ability to succeed as an artist, and he wondered whether as a painter he could make a contribution to the welfare of African Americans. Now in his mid-twenties, he had come to believe that he had divinely-granted talents that should be used to improve the lot of blacks. This, he decided, he could do as a trained agriculturalist.

Besides, while he was giving up a career in art it was not as if he had decided to pursue something in which he had no interest. He had long studied plants and he already had developed skills in raising, cross-fertilizing, and grafting plants. He quickly made an impression on the faculty of Iowa State College, and his professors encouraged him to stay on as a graduate student after his senior year. Working with L.H. Pammel, a noted mycologist, Carver honed his talent at identifying and treating plant diseases.

Carver obtained his Master of Agriculture degree in 1896 and immediately received a number of offers. He was asked to join the faculty of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, a school for blacks in Mississippi. The faculty at Iowa State wanted him to stay and teach. But it was an offer from Booker T. Washington that proved most attractive. Washington had persuaded the trustees of Tuskegee Institute to establish an agricultural school. Since Washington wanted the faculty to remain all black and since Carver was the only African American in the country with graduate training in "scientific agriculture," he was the logical choice. Carver was at first hesitant to go to Tuskegee, but Washington was persuasive and on April 12, 1896, Carver accepted, writing that "it has always been the one great ideal of my life to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of 'my people' possible and to this end I have been preparing myself these many years; feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people."⁸

¹ Cited in Cited in Gary Kremer, ed., George Washington Carver: In His Own Words (Columbia, Missouri: The University of Missouri Press, 1987), p. 3.

² George Washington Carver, 1897 or thereabouts, George Washington Carver Papers, Tuskegee Institute Archives, reel 1.

³ Carver, A Brief Sketch of My Life, ibid.

⁴ Linda McMurry, George Washington Carver: Scientist & Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 9-10.

⁵ Carver, A Brief Sketch, Carver Papers, reel 1.

⁶ McMurry, Carver, p. 18; Rackham Holt, George Washington Carver: An American Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1946), p. 19.

⁷ Quoted in McMurry, Carver, p. 28.

⁸ Carver to Booker T. Washington, April 12, 1896, Booker T. Washington Papers (online version) vol. 4; p. 159.