Lewis Descoins Belair (ca. 1792–1875), bookseller, was born to French émigrés shortly after they fled Saint Domingue. He settled in Philadelphia by 1816 and operated bookshops specializing in foreign works there and in New York City by 1818. Belair was among the French immigrants who invested in the Vine and Olive Colony, which received a congressional land grant in 1817 in present-day Alabama. While returning from a visit to his 480-acre tract in 1822, Belair stopped at Monticello during one of TJ’s absences. He never settled in Alabama and eventually sold the land. Belair later served as a justice of the peace in Philadelphia County. At his death he left his family bequests totaling $128,000, with an additional $24,000 plus the “residue of the estate” going to eight charitable organizations in Philadelphia, including the Apprentices’ Library and the French Benevolent Society (James Robinson, The Philadelphia Directory for 1816 [Philadelphia, 1816]; New-York Gazette & General Advertiser, 14 July 1818; Belair to TJ, 6 Nov. 1818, 24 Aug. 1822; Kent Gardien, “The Domingan Kettle: Philadelphian-Émigré Planters in Alabama,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 76 [1998]: 173–87, esp. 184; Rafe Blaufarb, Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835 [2005], 25, 166, 190; ASP description begins American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, 1832–61, 38 vols. description ends , Public Lands, 5:16, 26; Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania [1837], 3:566; Philadelphia Inquirer, 16, 18, 29 Oct. 1875).