George William Featherstonhaugh (1780–1866), farmer, geologist, and diplomat, was born in London and educated in Throxenby and Scarborough, both in the North Riding of Yorkshire, England. He traveled in Europe in 1799–1800 before working as a commercial agent in Leghorn, Italy, and then conducted business in London in 1804. Featherstonhaugh lived in the United States by 1808, when he married Sarah Duane and began employing scientific principles in farming her extensive landholdings in Duanesburg, Schenectady County, New York. He was elected president of the Duanesburg Agricultural Society in 1819 and the following year became corresponding secretary of the newly established Board of Agriculture of the State of New-York. Featherstonhaugh promoted a railroad between Schenectady and Albany, and he was appointed vice president of the resulting Mohawk and Hudson Rail Road Company in 1826. That same year he returned to England to research railroads. There Featherstonhaugh also studied geology extensively before returning to New York state the following year and moving a little over a year after that to New York City, where he lectured on geology at Columbia College (later Columbia University). He moved in 1830 to Philadelphia, where he established a scientific journal and lobbied for a state geological survey. In 1832 Featherstonhaugh moved to Washington, D.C., to advocate for a national geological survey. His campaign did not succeed, and instead he was appointed to make surveys in the Arkansas and Wisconsin territories. In 1838 Featherstonhaugh declined a request from the United States Topographical Bureau to survey the contested boundary between Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick. He returned to his native country the following year and accepted the same commission on behalf of the British government. In addition to scientific works, Featherstonhaugh published two travel accounts and a novel. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1809 and the Royal Society in 1835. Featherstonhaugh was appointed British consul in 1844 at Le Havre, France, and served in that post until his death there (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DSB description begins Charles C. Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 1970–80, 16 vols. description ends ; ODNB description begins H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, 60 vols. description ends ; Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, George William Featherstonhaugh: The First U.S. Government Geologist [1988]; NAlI: Featherstonhaugh Papers; Albany Guardian, 12 Nov. 1808; APS description begins American Philosophical Society description ends , Minutes, 21 Apr. 1809 [MS in PPAmP]; DNA: RG 29, CS, N.Y., Duanesburg, 1810, 1820; Address of the General Committee; London Daily News, 1 Oct. 1866; London Sunday Times, 14 Oct. 1866; gravestone inscription in Kent and Sussex Cemetery and Crematorium, Royal Tunbridge Wells, England).

The Board of Agriculture of the State of New-York was established in April 1819 by “An act to improve the Agriculture of this State” passed by the state legislature. This statute appropriated funds to the counties of New York for promoting agriculture and called for an annual meeting of the Board of Agriculture, to be comprised of presidents or other delegates of the local agricultural societies. The Board of Agriculture met for the first time in January 1820, with Stephen Van Rensselaer as president and James Le Ray de Chaumont as vice president (Address of the General Committee, 3–5, 32).

On this date Featherstonhaugh sent the same pamphlet to James Madison (Madison, Papers, Retirement Ser., 2:24, 33).