Just after he turned forty-four, in August 1908, George Washington Carver visited the farm where he had been born and raised, along with the two key figures of his first thirteen years—his former owner Mose Carver and Mariah Watkins. For the first and last time in his life, Carver seemed to be seeking out people and scenes of those years that he had left behind with barely a look back.
Maybe he went because Mose, whom he hadn’t seen in nineteen years, was ninety-six. Maybe he had heard that the old man was planning to pass along his mother’s spinning wheel to him. Maybe Mariah’s Watkins’ letter to him a couple of years earlier, after thirty years not seeing him, was a factor in his going. - See more at: http://georgewashingtoncarver.us/#sthash.IyL0ympn.dpuf