Francis Julius LeMoyne was an American physician and philanthropist. He practiced medicine in Washington, Pennsylvania until his retirement in 1853.
Background
Francis Julius LeMoyne was the son and grandson of Parisian physicians. His father, John Julius LeMoyne de Villiers, came to America with French colonists, among whom he practised his profession for four years at Gallipolis, Ohio. In 1797 he married Nancy McCully, lately arrived from Ireland, and they removed to Washington, Pennsylvania, where Francis Julius was born.
Education
After graduating at Washington College in 1815, he studied medicine first with his father and later at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.
Career
In 1822, returning homeward across the Alleghanie, LeMoyne encountered a great snowstorm. The party in the stagecoach were unable to find accommodation at the crowded taverns along the way and so all night pushed forward through intense cold. Reaching Pittsburgh, Francis procured a horse and rode on to Washington. Although he was of robust constitution, after this experience he suffered from chronic rheumatism that did not allow him a night's repose in bed through twenty-nine years. About 1823 LeMoyne's father in helping others became bankrupt, so that to the physical handicap of the young doctor was added a burden of debt. From friends he was able to borrow money and recover the fine homestead built by his father in 1813, which with its old garden is still a point of interest in Washington. By hard work and frugal living he succeeded in restoring the family fortune after several years.
In the decade of the thirties he was an intrepid supporter of the antislavery movement, and an able debater in its cause, showing much physical courage in opposing the American Colonization Society, which he believed to be founded in the interests of slavery. He was the candidate of the Liberty Party for the vice-presidency of the United States in 1840, and the candidate of the Abolitionists for the governorship of Pennsylvania in 1841, 1844, and 1847. Later his house became one of the stations of the "Underground Railway, " enabling slaves to reach freedom in the North.
When he was about fifty-five, the condition of his health made the active practice of medicine no longer possible for him, and he turned to scientific farming, introducing improved strains of sheep, cattle, and horses into the county. He donated $10, 000 to the founding of a public library in his town, and for many years catalogued the books as they were acquired. Deeply concerned in the cause of education, he became in 1830 a trustee of Washington College (after 1865 Washington and Jefferson College) and in 1836, of the Washington Female Seminary at its founding.
He gave the American Missionary Association $20, 000 for the endowment and erection, on a bluff near Memphis, Tennessee, of the LeMoyne Normal Institute for colored people, still a successful enterprise. Later he added $5, 000 for its equipment. He established two professorships of $20, 000 each at Washington and Jefferson College, one in agriculture and correlative branches (1872), the other in applied mathematics (1879). These donations were prompted by the conviction that for students not entering the learned professions more profit was to be derived from the physical sciences than from Latin and Greek.
About 1874, in France and Italy, there was a sudden rise of interest in favor of cremation as a means of disposing of the dead, and LeMoyne became its first prominent advocate in America. In 1876 he erected the first crematory in the United States, situated on his own property on a hill overlooking Washington, where it stands today. The first public cremation took place there on December 6, 1876. It was that of a Bavarian nobleman, Baron Joseph Henry Louis de Palm who had come to America in 1862 and had died in New York. The event aroused much comment at the time. The body of LeMoyne himself was the third to be cremated, and up to the year 1900 there had been forty-one cremations in that place; since then none have occurred.
Achievements
Connections
In 1823 LeMoyne married Madeleine Romaine Bureau, whom he met at his father's house, whither she had brought a sister from Gallipolis for medical treatment. They had three sons and five daughters.