Carver turned peanuts into more than just food

George Washington Carver was a young man when he first heard Booker T. Washington deliver a speech from a podium. At first he was intrigued, then he became inspired.

It was in Dearborn, way up in Michigan. Dr. Washington, a young professor teaching at his alma mater, Iowa State, was a guest of Henry Ford. Besides his main love of building affordable automobiles,

Henry Ford absolutely loved farming. He was a farmer’s son, and Henry wanted to improve the lot of the American farmer. He and Carver began many joint ventures, their goal to to help emancipate farmers in the South from serving King Cotton, the cash crop that drained the land of nutrients, and left the sharecropper poor, too.

Young Mr. Carver was so impressed with Dr. Washington’s speech (Washington headed Tuskegee Institute) that he packed his bags and climbed aboard a train bound for Alabama.

The year was 1896. Carver never left Tuskegee. He didn’t even have a chemistry laboratory. He scrounged around in city dumps and farm barns for throwaway bottles and tools, and he constructed his own lab, Bunson burners and all ... Carver somehow prevailed and kept on teaching.

He produced, over the years, more than 300 products from the simple little peanut. Carver produced more than 100 products from the sweet potato ... an import that the slaves brought from Africa.
And the soybean! There is a picture of Henry Ford, somewhere in the 1920s or 1930s, wearing a handsome white suit that was made from the soybean. Car products came from a soybean “plastic.”

Now, a diesel fuel is emerging from the basic soybean.

Incredible ... but so many things date back to the long, productive and working life of Dr. George Washington Carver. He was born into slavery in 1865 in Diamond, Iowa. When he died in 1943, Dr. Carver had no more than $5,000 in a savings account ... this man, who with his many patents, could have acquired millions.

Thomas Edison was a great friend of Henry Ford and Dr. Carver ... and the botanist, Luther Burbank. Edison offered Carver a five-figure salary, yet the good doctor declined ... he could not leave his students. He made $1,500 at Tuskegee.

Asked why he never married, Carver just smiled: “How could I explain to a wife why I get up at 4 in the morning to go outside and talk to my flowers?” Carver was a passionate gardener.

He lived in a simple dormitory room, not far from his laboratory. President Franklin Roosevelt drove over one warm day in 1942 from Warm Springs and the Little White House. His convertible 1938 Ford, its top down and with burly Secret Service men standing on the running boards, and others following from behind, jumped a curb, and came to a stop beside Dr. Carver.

The president, smiling and totally happy, gripped Dr. Carver’s thin right arm, and said, “I’m so proud of you Dr. Carver ... I’m so proud, too, of this school. It’s wonderful.”

The next year Dr. Carver died; he was found in his small dorm room. He was 78, an old man tired of his long journey ... worn out from his work that produced so much for the world.

Bill Robinson lives in the Buffalo community of Chambers County and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.