om winning bake-off contests. From there he moved all over bouncing from school to school. "College entrance was a struggle again because of racial barriers."2 At the age of thirty he gained acceptance to Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. He was the first black student accepted to this college. Here he studied piano and art. With his ambition to pursue a science major, he transformed to Iowa Agricultural College (Iowa State) in 1891. He received his Bachelors of Science in 1894 and his Masters in bacterial botany and agriculture in 1897. He learned about fungi and the disease it causes. During his research he became known to agricultural centers all over the country. He went on to become the first black faculty member at Iowa State. He taught classes about soil conservation and chemurgy. In 1896, Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes, convinced Carver to go south and serve as the Tuskegee school director of agriculture. Here he would remain for the rest of his life. Here, in Alabama, he did experiments with peanuts, sweet potatoes, pecans, peas, and soybeans. He soon developed his crop rotation method where he alternated the soil depleting cotton crops with these soil-enriching crops. Since America depended mostly on southern agriculture at this time, his achievement was very important and valuable to southern farmers. Since a combination of cotton, tobacco, and the Civil War had depleted the soil of rich nutrients, Carver convinced all of the southern farmers to adopt his technique. This helped the south to recover and produce not only more, but bigger crops. He continued constantly working with peanuts, sweet potatoes, and pecans trying to produce new products. He developed more than 300 products from the peanut (including Peanut Butter), 175 from the sweet potato, and 60 from the pecan. He extracted blue, purple, and red pigments from the clay soil of Alabama. He researched the ma...
