Henry Leavitt Ellsworth

Henry Leavitt Ellsworth (November 10 1791 - December 27 1858) was a Yale-educated attorney who became the first Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, where he encouraged innovation by inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Samuel Colt, an early president of the Aetna Insurance Company, a major donor to Yale College, an agent to the Indian tribes along the western frontier, and the founder of what became the United States Department of Agriculture.

Ellsworth was born in Windsor, Connecticut, son of Founding Father and Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth and Abigail Wolcott, graduated from Yale University in 1810, and studied law at Tapping Reeve's Litchfield Law School in 1811. [ [http://books.google.com/books?id=oK5NAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA571&dq=charleston+south+carolina+st.+philips+church+frost#PPA309,M1 Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1912] ] On June 22 1813, he married Nancy Allen Goodrich, daughter of Congressman, Judge and New Haven Mayor Elizur Goodrich and Anne Willard, with whom he had three children.

Later in life, he had two subsequent wives, Marietta Mariana Bartlett and Catherine Smith. Ellsworth was named in part for his grandmother's family, the Leavitts of Suffield, Connecticut. [ [http://books.google.com/books?id=WLfMU4yd1FYC&pg=PA407&lpg=PA407&dq=the+history+of+the+descendants+of+john+dwight+jemima+leavitt&source=web&ots=I935FNZuXW&sig=Nx7sxkJaqgjruaLPW3xlYf1n1XY&hl=en#PPA406,M1 The History of the Descendants of John Dwight, of Dedham, Mass., Benjamin Woodbridge Dwight, New York, 1874] ] [A later family relation was Vermont attorney and photography pioneer Leavitt Hunt, whose full name was Henry Leavitt Hunt, and who was similarly named for his mother's Suffield Leavitt forebears.] After studying law under Judge Gould in Litchfield, Connecticut, he settled first at Windsor and then at Hartford, where he remained eight or ten years.

In 1811, when he was 19 years old and a freshly-minted Yale graduate, Ellsworth undertook the first of several western trips during his lifetime. Ellsworth traveled to the Connecticut Western Reserve in present-day Ohio by horseback to investigate family lands in the region. Ellsworth's father Oliver Ellsworth had purchased over 41,000 acres in the Western Reserve, including most of present-day Cleveland, joining with other prominent Connecticut men snapping up over three million acres sold by the state of Connecticut. [The New Connecticut (Ohio) towns of Ellsworth and Windsor were named after the family and its Connecticut home.] (Among the eight original purchasers was a family relation, merchant Thaddeus Leavitt of Suffield.) Ellsworth wrote a small, uneven book about his experiences entitled "A Tour to New Connecticut in 1811". Ellsworth's mission was straightening out irregularities in land sales by the family agent.

It was an arduous trip. Along the way Ellsworth made note of attractive vistas, rowdy drunks, helpful innkeepers and his disappointment in places of which he'd heard, like Erie. The journey's rigors were relieved by a meeting with his old friend Margaret Dwight, daughter of Yale president Timothy Dwight, who was visiting family in present-day Warren, Ohio. "Here too," wrote Ellsworth, "I met with my good old friend Margaret Dwight, we sat down and passed a few hours in social chat." Dwight wrote her own account of her Western Reserve trip, "A Journey to Ohio in 1810". [Margaret Dwight's manuscript was edited by Max Farrand and published in 1912 as Volume I of the Yale Historical Manuscripts series.] Over twenty years later, in 1832, Ellsworth traveled west again, this time as U.S. Commissioner of Indian Tribes in Arkansas and Oklahoma, appointed to oversee the removal of Native Americans to Oklahoma, accompanied on the expedition by three companions: noted author Washington Irving who recorded his impressions in "A Tour on the Prairies"; Charles La Trobe, an Englishman, mountaineer and travel writer who later served in the British diplomatic corps in the West Indies and Australia; and Swiss Count Albert Pourtales. [ [http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Chronicles/v040/v040p355.pdf The Journal of the Union Mission, Hope Holway, University of Oklahoma] ]

Washington Irving wrote of Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, "this worthy leader of our little band": "He was a native of one of the towns of Connecticut, a man in whom a course of legal practice and political life had not been able to vitiate an innate simplicity and benevolence of heart. The greater part of his days had been passed in the bosom of his family and the society of deacons, elders, and statesmen, on the peaceful banks of the Connecticut; when suddenly he had been called to mount his steed, shoulder his rifle and mingle among stark hunters, backwoodsmen, and naked savages, on the trackless wilds of the Far West." [ [http://books.google.com/books?id=a04VAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22a+tour+on+the+prairies%22+washington+irving&ei=vObwSNHyCJqktAOL99Fy#PPA2,M1 A Tour on the Prairies, Washington Irving, Henry G. Bohn, London, 1850] ] (Translation: Leavitt was finally relaxing and letting his hair down.)

In 1835, Ellsworth was elected mayor of Hartford, Connecticut, but had served only a month when he was appointed the first Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, an office he held for ten years -- from 1835 until 1845. His twin brother William W. Ellsworth was Governor of Connecticut from 1838 to 1842, and served as a U.S. Congressman from Connecticut as well. William Wolcott Ellsworth was married to the daughter of Noah Webster, a farmer's son who published dictionaries.

In this role as Commissioner, he found one third of the floor-space in his office occupied by over 60 models of inventions; he moved them to a separate room. He also found that no list of patent applicants had ever been drawn up, a deficiency he corrected. Acting as Patent Commissioner, Ellsworth made a decision that would profoundly affect the future of Hartford and Connecticut. The young Samuel Colt, struggling to establish a firm to manufacture his new revolver, was aided by Ellsworth, who in 1836 made the decision to issue Colt U. S. Patent No. 138. On the basis of Ellsworth's decision, Colt was able to raise some $200,000 from investors to incorporate the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, New Jersey, the forerunner of the mighty Colt arms manufacturing empire. [ [http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1968/4/1968_4_4.shtml Gunmaker to the World, Ellsavorth S. Grant, American Heritage Magazine, June, 1968, americanheritage.com] ]

In today's world Ellsworth would be described as an early technology adapter. He became so interested, for instance, in a new-fangled invention by Samuel Morse called the telegraph that he obtained a $30,000 grant from Congress to test the possibilities of the technology. [ [http://patentmodelassociation.com/story.html The Story of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, patentmodelassociation.com] ]

From Ellworth's exposure to the West and knowledge of inventions, he prophesied late in life that the lands of the West would be cultivated by means of steam plows. This prophecy was introduced in the probate of his will in an attempt to prove that he was of unsound mind.

Ellsworth was proven correct, of course, and his interest in agriculture during his time as Patent Commissioner induced Congress in 1839 to appropriate the first monies for farming, used to collect seeds from other countries and distribute them through the United States post office, as Ellsworth had urged. By 1845 Ellsworth's patent office was performing the functions of a full-fledged agricultural bureau. For this accomplishment Ellsworth earned the sobriquet "Father of the United States Department of Agriculture."

A comment of his relating to the increased workload at the patent office, taken out of context and embellished, was apparently the source of the urban legend that a patent office official (Charles H. Duell in some versions) claimed that everything which could be invented has been invented. [cite journal | url=http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_3_27/ai_100755224 | title=A Patently False Patent Myth still | journal=Skeptical Inquirer | date=May-June, 2003 | author=Samuel Sass]

Following Ellworth's stint in the Patent Office, he settled in Lafayette, Indiana, acting as an agent for purchase and settlement of public land, but in 1857 returned to Connecticut. Ellsworth later served as an early president of the Aetna Insurance Company. He was an early benefactor of Yale College, donating some $700,000 to his alma mater. [ [http://books.google.com/books?id=PfYLAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA295&lpg=PA295&dq=aetna+%22henry+l.+ellsworth%22&source=web&ots=SZzDlbYW3z&sig=bmAexlF3MqsctDaDcyd5JxHNQBo&hl=en The Connecticut Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, Wiliam Farrand Felch, Vol. I, January, 1895, Hartford] ]

Ellsworth died, aged 67, on December 27 1858 in Fair Haven, Connecticut. Following his death, Ellsworth's papers were discovered among the family papers of the Goodrich family. Ellsworth was a Yale classmate of Chauncey Allen Goodrich [Chauncey Allen Goodrich was also the brother-in-law of William Wolcott Ellsworth, Henry Leavitt's brother. Goodrich and Ellsworth had both married daughters of dictionary publisher Noah Webster.] , son of Chauncey Goodrich, whose daughter Nancy Henry Leavitt Ellsworth married. The journal of Ellsworth's first trip to New Connecticut came to the Yale University Library as part of the Goodrich Family Collection. The former patent commissioner's papers today make up the Henry Leavitt Ellsworth Papers at Yale's Sterling Library.

References

External links

* [http://www.indianasstoryteller.org/library/manuscripts/collection_guides/sc2378.html] Henry L. Ellsworth Circular, 1837, Indiana Historical Society, Manuscripts & Archives
* [http://aghalloffame.com/hall/ellsworth.aspx] Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, National Agricultural Hall of Fame
* [http://mssa.library.yale.edu/findaids/stream.php?xmlfile=mssa.ms.0196.xml] Guide to the Henry Leavitt Ellsworth Papers, Yale University Library

Further reading

* "A Tour to New Connecticut in 1811: The Narrative of Henry Leavitt Ellsworth", Phillip R. Shriver, Volume I of the Western Reserve History Studies Series, The Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, 1985