The Peanut Farmer God Knew Before Anyone Did

George Washington Carver was born into slavery in Diamond, Missouri, around 1864. Within weeks of his birth, Confederate raiders kidnapped him and his mother. His mother was never found. An infant, sick and orphaned, was traded back to his former owner Moses Carver for a single racehorse.

No birth certificate recorded his arrival. No hospital noted his weight or length. By every measure of his era, George Washington Carver entered the world as nobody — unnamed, uncounted, invisible to the systems that tracked human lives.

Yet the God who knit him together in his mother's womb had already searched him and known him. The Almighty who discerned his thoughts from afar had woven into that frail infant's mind a capacity for science that would revolutionize Southern agriculture. Before Carver ever held a peanut in his hands, before he walked the fields of Tuskegee, before he discovered over three hundred uses for a single crop, El Roi — the God Who Sees — had already traced the path of every one of his days.

Carver himself understood this. He rose each morning at four o'clock to walk the woods and pray, telling friends, "I never have to grope for methods. The method is revealed the moment I am inspired to create something new."