Isaac Newton was an agriculturalist who became the first United States Commissioner of Agriculture.
Background
Isaac Newton was born on March 31, 1800 in Burlington County, New Jersey, United States. He was the son of Isaac and Mary (Newton) Newton, of English ancestry and orthodox Quaker stock. His father, a farmer, died young, and his mother, left a widow at eighteen when Isaac was only a few months old, continued to live in the home of her father-in-law, a prosperous farmer of Burlington County.
Education
Isaac's education was gained mostly in the county and state schools of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and he was thoroughly taught the principles of farming on his grandfather's farm.
Career
Newton was asked to take charge of two adjoining farms in Springfield, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, which under his care became celebrated for their neatness, order, and productiveness. To make use of the surplus of milk and cream from his farm he opened an ice-cream and confectionery shop in Philadelphia.
About 1854, acting on the advice of a friend, he purchased a thousand-acre tract of farm land in Prince William County, Virginia, but this venture later proved unsuccessful, partly because of the outbreak of the Civil War.
Early in 1861 Newton, who was personally acquainted with Lincoln, was appointed by him superintendent of the agricultural division of the Patent Office, the small bureau which at that time had charge of national agricultural interests. This was enlarged the following year by the Act of May 15, 1862, establishing a department of agriculture with a commissioner at its head. To this post Newton was appointed by President Lincoln and was thus the first incumbent of the office. Within the first few months, a skilled horticulturist, William Saunders of Pennsylvania, was appointed botanist and superintendent of the propagating garden, and C. M. Wetherill, department chemist. Other early appointments were those of Lewis Bollman to be statistician, and Townend Glover to be entomologist. These appointments were the beginnings of the present large bureaus of plant industry, chemistry, agricultural economics, and entomology. In his first and second annual reports Newton dwelt upon the vital importance in agriculture of the weather and climate. In his third report, that for 1864, he advocated that daily weather reports be communicated by telegraph over the whole country under the supervision of the government. His recommendations were among the factors that contributed to the organization of the government meteorological service, or Weather Bureau, first established in the office of the chief signal officer of the army, and in July 1891 transferred to the Department of Agriculture.
Newton obtained land in Washington on the Mall, between 12th and 14th Streets, for an experimental farm, and he secured from Congress the appropriation for a new building to house the Department.
In July 1866, while on the Department experimental field, he suffered a sunstroke, and though he partially recovered, he died from its effects within a year.
The foundations of the Department which he laid were solid and not unworthy of the superstructure of later years. The important records of his efforts are contained in the annual Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the years 1862-66. His Circular on the Present Agricultural, Mineral, and Manufacturing Condition and Resources of the United States, issued in 1862, was his initial plea to the "farmers and friends of agriculture" for co-operation with the new Department in carrying into effect "the beneficent and important ends contemplated by its organization. "
Achievements
Personality
Despite his limited education, the evidence indicates that Newton was a man of good sense and vision and earnestly devoted to the interests of agriculture.
Connections
On October 18, 1821 he married Dorothy Burdsall of Philadelphia.