In the American Civil War, raiders swept through south-western Missouri. They seized a slave mother and her baby on Moses Carver's Diamond Grove farm near Diamond, Mo. Carver reportedly got the baby back in exchange for a $300 racehorse, but the mother was not found. The slaveholder named the motherless child George Washington Carver. Young Carver did not grow strong enough to work in the fields, but he did household chores: In the garden he made plants flourish. He had been freed from slavery for several years before he left the Carvers to get an education. Doing cooking, laundry and odd jobs, he worked his way through high school in Kansas. He then earned his way at Simpson College at Indianola, Iowa, and-Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, now Iowa State University, at Ames. He got his M.S. degree in agriculture in 1896. Carver's achievements with plants brought him to the attention of Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Carver became head of Tuskegee's agriculture department in 1896. In his 47 years there, the great plant scientist-did notable work in scientific agriculture and chemurgical, the industrial use of raw products from plants. He made hundreds of useful products from peanuts and sweet potatoes alone. Carver was in addition a painter and a musician. In 1940 he gave his life savings toward establishing the George Washington Carver Foundation for research in agricultural chemistry. Ten years after his death in Tuskegee on January 5, 1943, Carver's birthplace was dedicated as a national monument.
According to the passage, George Washington Carver's mother ------ .