Sometime near the end of the Civil War, a slave was born here in a cabin. His mother, Mary, named the baby - her second son - George. Moses Carver had purchased Mary as an enslaved person back in 1855, when she was about 13 years old.
Years of violence and guerrilla war had terrorized settlers here on the frontier Missouri-Kansas border. According to Moses Carver, when raiders found no cash at his farm, they carried off Mary and her baby. Imagine the fear and hopelessness that must have overcome Mary.
Moses asked a local Union scout, John Bentley, to recover his stolen property. Bentley returned with a very sick George, but Mary had disappeared. Carver rewarded Bentley with a $300 racehorse. In George's later memory of this story, he focused on how Moses had made a special effort to get him back. To George, this seemed the first tangible indication that he was a special person, destined to accomplish much with his life.
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