The LeConte Family. Although the American roots of this important family of scientists and educators go back to Guillaume LeConte, a French Huguenot, originally from Rouen, the family seat was the Woodmanston Plantation, established by John Eatton LeConte in Midway, GA in 1760. He had two famous sons, one also named John Eatton LeConte (1784-1860, APS 1851), who was a noted naturalist and a topographical engineer, and another named Louis LeConte (1782-1838), trained as a medical doctor at Columbia College in New York. John Eatton LeConte, a captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, resided first in New York City and later in Philadelphia. His son, John Lawrence LeConte (1825-1883, APS 1853) was a noted entomologist and physician.
Louis LeConte inherited the family plantation in Midway, married Ann Quarterman and fathered seven children, one of whom died in infancy. He had a keen interest in botany and horticulture, and developed a botanical and floral garden at Woodsmanton, that soon became internationally renown. His wife Ann died in 1826, leaving Louis to raise his six surviving children. Louis LeConte’s most eminent children were his sons John LeConte (1818-1891, APS 1873), a physicist, and Joseph LeConte (1823-1901, APS 1873), a geologist. John was a graduate of Franklin College and New York City’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, who practiced medicine in Savannah, GA, before being appointed professor of physics and chemistry at Franklin College. His preference for physics led him to a faculty position at South Carolina College (later the University of South Carolina), which he held until 1869. In 1868 he was elected chair of physics at the newly established University of California, of which he later became president. His younger brother Joseph also graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, but later studied at Harvard’s new Lawrence Scientific School under Louis Agassiz in 1850. He accepted a call to teach all of the sciences at Oglethorpe University, but resigned to teach science briefly at the University of Georgia before becoming chair of geology at the College of South Carolina, Columbia, where his brother was already teaching. After the Civil War, difficult conditions led Joseph, like his brother John, to apply for a teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley. Both brothers moved to California with their widowed sister Jane LeConte Harden. Matilda Jane Harden Stevens (1837-1932), Jane’s daughter, remained in Georgia for many years, and corresponded with several of her more prominent LeConte uncles and cousins.
From the guide to the LeConte family papers, 1827-1901, 1827-1901, (American Philosophical Society)
