03/16/2019
Here is what was posted on the Loretto Towers FB page in August 2014. In which Lea's garden were those soybeans planted?
WHY ILLINOIS IS #1 IN SOYBEAN PRODUCTION
MAGICAL BEANS IN ALTON, IL GARDEN
James Henry Lea, whose former home anchored Alton’s first Catholic orphanage, and Henry Lea are not to be confused but often are. Henry is why his nephew James Henry, born into a Quaker family in Philadelphia, came to Alton. That first Alton City Directory in 1858 lists Henry as owning a dry goods store downtown on Third Street between Belle and Piasa Streets with James Henry and Joseph Brown, who was mayor of Alton about this time, owned a fleet of fast riverboats and later served as St. Louis mayor and Missouri Pacific Railroad president. But don’t think Henry Lea was just a well-connected merchant. Like Jack and the Bean Stalk, Henry Lea planted magical beans in his garden.
Henry Lea was already well established in the river town by 1845 when he wed a much younger Louisa Jane “Jenny” Trumbull of the Worcester, MA Trumbulls. She had come west to help out her eldest sister Elizabeth who was married to William Lever Lincoln, a Massachusetts governor’s son who had gone to Bowdoin College with Longfellow and Hawthorne. Lincoln had no sooner set up his law practice in Alton than Elijah P. Lovejoy, the crusading journalist, was murdered. Lincoln was city attorney in the trial that followed. Whether because of Elizabeth’s health or, as his memorial ceremony suggested, “promises about Alton” were not fulfilled in 10 years here, the Lincolns returned east. Jane, as she became known, stayed on. We’re still climbing around the Trumbull family tree to see exactly how she was related to Lyman Trumbull, the U.S. Senator who co-authored the 12th Amendment and lived over on Henry and Union.
The Henry Leas made their home on State between 4th and Bond in 1858. He planted the first soybeans in Illinois in his garden in the summer of 1851 after his friend Dr. Benjamin Franklin Edwards, a Philadelphia-trained physician whose brother had a chain of supply stores, brought seeds back from Japan. Lea proceeded to disseminate the seeds throughout the country. An academic became so confused by the Leas that he credits a “John Henry Lea,” but – alas! – the nation’s soybean industry did not begin in the backyard of today’s Loretto Towers.
Like his brother-in-law William Lincoln, Henry Lea got homesick for the east. When he retired, he and Jane moved back to Wilmington, DE where he had been born. To confuse matters, they named their only son – born in Alton – James Henry. But he was called Harry.
