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George Washington Carver card art from Lost Chapters (Gold, Character)
Card art: George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver: Gold Character

George Washington Carver (about 1864 to 1943) was an agricultural scientist and teacher who was born into slavery in Missouri. At the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama he taught Southern farmers to rotate crops and to grow peanuts and sweet potatoes to restore soil worn out by cotton.

Cost
4 crystals
Type
Character · Inventor
Power / Health
3 / 5
Color
Gold (Inventors & Industry)
Rarity
Common
Set
Liberty & Lightning (Set 1)
Keywords
Protest

Protest

On play: draw a card.

Agricultural alchemist who transformed humble peanuts into scientific gold.

Real history

The real history

Carver was born enslaved on Moses Carver's farm in Missouri, near the end of the Civil War. The exact date is unknown, and estimates run from 1860 to 1865. He was orphaned as an infant and raised by Moses Carver and his wife after slavery ended. As a boy he was so good with plants that people called him the "plant doctor."

Carver went to school in Neosho, Missouri, and later moved to Iowa. After studying art and music at Simpson College, he transferred to Iowa State Agricultural College, now Iowa State University. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1894 and a master's degree in 1896.

In 1896 Booker T. Washington recruited him to lead agriculture at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, where he worked for the rest of his life. He saw that years of cotton had drained Southern soil. He urged farmers to rotate their crops and to plant peanuts and sweet potatoes, and he wrote free bulletins and ran traveling programs to reach them. From peanuts alone he developed hundreds of new products. In 1921 he spoke to a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on behalf of the peanut industry.

Carver did not invent peanut butter. He filed only three patents, for a cosmetic cream and for paints and stains, and none was for peanut butter. He received the Spingarn Medal in 1923 and died in 1943.

Sources

  1. George Washington Carver, Science History Institute
  2. George Washington Carver Patent for Cosmetics, National Archives
  3. History and Culture, George Washington Carver National Monument, National Park Service

Checked against these sources on October 2, 2026. Spot a mistake? Report an error. How we check facts.

Game lore (invented)

In the game's story

In the game's invented story, Carver arrives in a field outside Dogear Crossing, kneels and finds the soil tired from generations of the same grain. He spends a month walking the farms, then gives a talk in the market square that sends the farmers home arguing about crop rotation, and the next harvest is the best in living memory. He finds dozens of uses for the Inkwash reed, and the Bulwark knights adopt his card as their emblem: the one who holds.

In Lost Chapters' frame story, history's heroes fall into an invented world called Marginalia. That story is fiction; the history on this page is real.

How the card plays

Carver costs 4 crystals and is a 3/5 Common Inventor with Protest, which means your rival can't choose him as the target of a charge. He can still block. When he arrives, draw a card.

That makes him a safe body that replaces himself. With 5 health and no way for the rival to charge him directly, he is a sturdy blocker that holds the line while you build toward bigger plays.

He fits any Gold Inventors deck. Nikola Tesla, Father of Electricity cuts his cost to 3 while it is on the field, and Genius Convention gives all your Inventors +1/+1. Under the Tesla Leader he gets +1/+0 as an Inventor, so he blocks as a 4/5.

Questions about Carver

Did George Washington Carver invent peanut butter?

No. The National Archives notes that Carver filed three patents and none was for peanut butter. His real work was finding hundreds of uses for peanuts and teaching farmers to grow them.

Where did George Washington Carver go to college?

He studied at Simpson College in Iowa, then at Iowa State Agricultural College, now Iowa State University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1894 and a master's in 1896.

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