J. Peter Lesley House
This dignified Greek Revival town house, built in 1835-36 for Aristides Monges (1802-1839), was the home and office of J. Peter Lesley (1819-1903), one of America's foremost geologists, who rented it from 1869 until 1896. Lesley brought scientific methods to the study of natural resources, especially coal and oil—in service of American industry.
Lesley graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1838, but poor health kept him from immediately studying for the ministry, as he intended. Instead, he took a job as an assistant researcher in the First Geological Survey of Pennsylvania, which was mapping the state’s vast mineral resources. This changed his life, for while he resumed his intended study at the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1841 and was appointed the pastor of the Congregational church in Milton, Massachusetts, he continued to work as a geologist during the summers and made a geological study tour of Europe in 1844-1845.
He gave up the church in 1851 to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company as a researcher, and he established his reputation with important books on coal mining (1856) and iron making (1859). In 1859 he was appointed a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he would later serve as the dean of the Towne Scientific School. In 1863-1864, he turned his attention to the Pennsylvania oil industry, and, as he had done with coal, Lesley established the relationship between topography and the valuable resources buried underground. After two years in Europe, 1866-1868, recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by overwork, he returned with his wife Susan to Philadelphia, where he rented this house.
Lesley became the Geologist for the Commonwealth State of Pennsylvania and Director of its Second Geological Survey in 1874. For the next 22 years, this house was both his home and the office from which he directed the team that mapped Pennsylvania’s natural resources. The enormous Second Survey ultimately comprised 120 volumes of reports and atlases.
His wife, Susan Inches Lesley (1823-1904) shared this house and his life. A prominent figure in Philadelphia’s philanthropic community, she was a generous donor and the organizer of other donors to support the jobless, homeless, and formerly incarcerated.
NHL nomination: 94001646_NHL