Thomas Melvill (1776–1845), merchant, farmer, and public official, was born in Boston and was the uncle of the author Herman Melville. Around 1790 he was apprenticed to a merchant in that city. Four years later his mercantile firm sent Melvill to Europe, and he spent most of the next seventeen years in France before returning to Massachusetts in 1811. At the outbreak of the War of 1812, the Massachusetts government appointed Melvill commissary of prisoners and superintendent of army supplies with the rank of major, stationed at Pittsfield. The following year he became deputy marshal of the state. After the war ended Melvill remained in Pittsfield, where he owned a farm and worked as a tenant farmer and land agent for his father. In 1822 he opened a store selling farm machinery. A member of the Berkshire Agricultural Society from at least 1813, Melvill was its president, 1814–16 and 1818–19. He was a Democrat who supported Andrew Jackson’s 1832 presidential reelection and represented Pittsfield the following year in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. By 1838 Melvill had moved permanently to Galena, Illinois, where he worked in the office of the superintendent of lead mines (Joseph E. A. Smith, The History of Pittsfield … from the year 1800 to the year 1876 [1876]; Merton M. Sealts Jr., “Thomas Melvill, Jr., in ‘The History of Pittsfield,’” Harvard Library Bulletin 35 [1987]: 201–17; Madison, Papers, Pres. Ser., 6:108; Pittsfield Sun, 2 May 1816, 22 Oct. 1817, 7 June 1832, 22 Nov. 1838, 14 Aug. 1845; Pittsfield Berkshire Star, 22 Oct. 1818; DNA: RG 29, CS, Mass., Pittsfield, 1820, 1830, Ill., Galena, 1840; Boston Daily Advertiser & Patriot, 28 Feb. 1833; gravestone inscription in Greenwood Cemetery, Galena).

The Berkshire Agricultural Society began when local residents organized one of the first agricultural fairs in the United States, a cattle show at Pittsfield in 1810. The Massachusetts General Court formally incorporated the society the following year in order to promote “Agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country.” TJ’s correspondent Elkanah Watson served as its first president. By 1892 the society had 1,194 members, including 105 women, but with mounting debts it ceased to exist a decade later (Smith, History of Pittsfield, 327–9; Transactions of the Berkshire Agricultural Society, for the Year 1865 [1866], 13–5; Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, Annual Report of the Secretary 40 [1893]: 320–1; Edward Boltwood, The History of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from the year 1876 to the year 1916 [1916], 94).

On this day Melvill sent a similar letter and enclosure to James Madison (Madison, Papers, Pres. Ser., 10:153–4).