One day he received a letter from Booker T. Washington, who the most respected black educator in the country. Washington asked him to work at the Tuskegee Institute, a black agricultural school in Alabama. Tuskegee was a poor black school that could not give Carver a laboratory or a high salary, but Carver decided to go there.
In 1896, Carver started to teach and do research with plants at the Tuskegee Institute. He taught classes on agriculture, and through his experiments he found new ways to help the poor, struggling farmers of the South. Here, farmers had been growing cotton, with wore out the soil. He showed farmers how to plant different crops like peanuts to make the soil richer. After a while, farmers did what he said and were growing more and more peanuts. They were now making more money from peanuts than from cotton.
Caver developed many uses for the peanut. In fact, he found more than 300 uses for the peanut, and he became know as the "peanut man." He received many prizes and awards for his work. He gave lectures about for the uses for peanuts all over the United State and even spoke to Congress about peanuts in 1921. Meanwhile, Carver began to experiment with the sweet potato and discovered more than 100 products that could be made from it, including glue for postage stamps.
By the 1930s, Carver had become famous all over the country and the world. He visited the Prince of Sweden and the British Prince of Wales. Thomas Edison asked Carver to work for him at a salary of more than $100,0000 a year. The car manufacturer Henry Ford also made him a generous offer. But Carver war not interested in money; he stayed on at the Tuskegee Institute with a monthly salary of $125.
In 1940, he gave all his life savings of $33,000 to the George Washington Carver Foundation to provide opportunities for African American to study in his field, because for Carver, "Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom. . . ." Carver died in 1943.