Josiah Meigs (1757-1822)	(source unknown)
Born in Middletown, Connecticut August 21, 1757, he received a college education at Yale. An energetic (possibly temperamental) guy, he became City Clerk of New Haven and started a newspaper, now known as the New Haven Gazette, which was used to argue for Federalism. He passed the bar in 1783

He then moved to Washington and became U.S. Surveyor General and then 2nd Commissioner of the U.S. General Land Office in 1814 (this evolved into the BLM) focusing on midwestern territories such as Illinois. In 1817, the year following the famous "year without a summer", he ordered the various land offices to collect meteorological observations, and thus started the second effort to collect systematic meteorological observations in the US, the first being started by the US Army medical corps a few years earlier. Apparently the original observations have been lost. He was also 2nd president of the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences, an early but unsuccessful precursor to the Smithsonian Institution. He was one of the original trustees of Columbian College, now George Washington University. In 1820 he was also part of a successful effort to introduce national vaccinations for smallpox. He died in 1822.

(source: Meigs, W.M., 1887: Life of Josiah Meigs, http://fax.libs.uga.edu/CT275xM512xM5/1f/life_of_josiah_meigs.pdf.(privately printed). See also www.history.noaa.gov/stories_tales/meteorology.html, Henry, A.J., Monthly Weather Review, 59, 1931).