Legaux, Peter, 1748-1827

Peter Legaux was a lawyer and farmer and a member of the American Philosophical Society.

American Philosophical Society member Peter Legaux was an attorney and farmer.

In January 1793, Peter Legaux submitted a plan the American Philosophical Society for "the establishment of the Vine culture in Pennsylvania by means of public subscription, authorized and protected by Government." In 1785, Legaux, a Francophone emigrant from Saint Domingue, purchased Mount Joy, the former estate of Anthony Morris overlooking the Schuylkill River at Spring Mill, 13 miles northwest of Philadelphia, and began farming.

From early in his residence at Spring Mill, Legaux appears to have conceived his farm as a place to promote advanced agricultural practices, including viticulture, and he indulged a variety of scientific interests that earned him election to the American Philosophical Society in July 1789. Legaux read works on electricity, assisted Jean Pierre Blanchard on the first manned balloon flight in America in 1793, and he donated a book on the history of Surinam, yet to his peers he was been best known for his careful meteorological observations at Spring Mill. From as early as 1787, Legaux built upon the work of Rittenhouse and Rush. The traveler François Alexandre Rochefoucauld-Liancourt found Legaux to be "dissatisfied with everyone" and regarded him as a "worthless and litigious man," but Legaux was acquainted with a wide and important circle, including Thomas Jefferson, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, Stephen Girard, and John Vaughan, and carried some weight within the robust French community in Philadelphia.

Following Legaux's proposal to the APS, the Pennsylvania legislature passed an act authorizing the incorporation of a company for promoting culture of the vine. A subscription was raised and shares issued to some of Philadelphia's most important merchants and friends of improvement, from Robert Morris and Benjamin Rush to Bohl Bohlen, Israel Whelen, John Wachsmuth, and Benjamin Franklin Bache, as well as the French minister, Citizen Gênet. Sales, however, did not meet expectations, and the project languished until April 1800, when the Pennsylvania Commissioners for the Cultivation of the Vine liberalized the original act to stimulate stock sales. After a public notice was placed in the Pennsylvania Gazette in April 1800, encouraging the formation of a company to encourage viticulture in the state and to train vine dressers, 1,000 shares were made available at $20 each.

Having issued over 550 shares, Governor Thomas McKean, a subscriber himself, directed that the Vine Company be incorporated in January 1802, and in June of the following year, Legaux was hired as superintendant of the vineyards at a rate of $300 per year. He oversaw the daily operations, the planting, grafting, weeding, and harvesting, and communicated regularly with the officers of society, including Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, Benjamin Say, Mathew Carey, Stephen Girard, Bernard McMahon, and Thomas Hodgson.

Legaux experimented with different varieties of grape and different techniques of raising them, but the Company was never as profitable as hoped. It failed to make its debts and its vineyards were seized and sold at public auction in 1822. Legaux thereafter remained at Spring Mill, farming and recording the weather, but was less in the public eye. Shortly after recapitulating the events of 1826 with a note on the deaths of his "dear friends and the friends of the human kind," John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Legaux fell ill with fever. In January 1827, he scrawled a journal entry "I am very sick... Like Death... and in Great Suffrances from head to feet &c &c and can do Nothing Except to horribly Complain against Nature & God!!!!!!" His last entry was made at the end of March. He was survived by his wife Catherine Bosler and their three daughters.