Library of CongressGeorge Washington Carver oversees the work of some of his botany students.

There, Carver performed miracles with the humble peanut in particular. He showed poor, black sharecroppers how to make a decent living turning peanuts into more than 300 products, including peanut butter, shampoo, wood stains and glue.

In the 1940s, black polio sufferers flocked to Tuskegee from across the South to get Carver's free, personal massages using peanut oil, which he and they believed was a miracle curative.

"Come to find out, it wasn't the peanut oil," Ranger Baxter reports. "It was the massages."

Carver, who had told Tuskegee's President Washington that he'd come for a couple of years in order to help fellow blacks, would stay at the institute for 47 years, right up to his death in 1943.

Carver, who became so immersed in his work that he routinely forgot to cash his modest paychecks, never married. "The reason, he always said, was that he would get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and go out on his daily hikes," Baxter says.

"And he would come back with mud on his shoes, and he said, 'No woman would ever put up with that.'...He was probably right."

Together, George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington taught not just Tuskegee students, but also poor Alabama farmers who had no time, money or education to go to college. The two men took their books and plants and test tubes out into the country in a farm wagon, or what they called their "movable school."