Henry Leavitt Ellsworth (November 10, 1791 – December 27, 1858) was a Yale-educated attorney who became the first Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, where he encouraged innovation by inventors Samuel F.B.

Ellsworth also served as the second president of the Aetna Insurance Company, and was a major donor to Yale College,[1] a commissioner to Indian tribes on the western frontier, and the founder of what became the United States Department of Agriculture.

[4][5] After studying law under Judge Gould in Litchfield, Connecticut, he settled first at Windsor and then at Hartford, where he remained for a decade.

Along the way Ellsworth made note of attractive vistas, rowdy drunks, solicitous innkeepers and his disappointment in places of which he had heard, like Erie.

"Here too", wrote Ellsworth, "I met with my good old friend Margaret Dwight, we sat down and passed a few hours in social chat."

)[9] Along the way, Ellsworth made stops in Cincinnati and Louisville, then traveled on to St. Louis, Missouri, where he met with explorer William Clark and saw the recently captured Native American leader Black Hawk, chief of the Sauk people.

Leavitt's mission was a complicated one: he was charged with trying to mediate between the conflicting claims of several Indian tribes, who were being forced into an ever-smaller area, in competition with newer immigrants and the interests of the Chouteau family, the powerful St. Louis magnates of the Midwestern fur trade.

[11] Washington Irving wrote of Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, "this worthy leader of our little band": "He was a native of one of the towns of Connecticut, a man in whom a course of legal practice and political life had not been able to vitiate an innate simplicity and benevolence of heart.

The greater part of his days had been passed in the bosom of his family and the society of deacons, elders, and statesmen, on the peaceful banks of the Connecticut; when suddenly he had been called to mount his steed, shoulder his rifle and mingle among stark hunters, backwoodsmen, and naked savages, on the trackless wilds of the Far West.

He became so interested, for instance, in a new-fangled invention by Samuel Morse called the telegraph that Ellsworth petitioned Congress for a $30,000 grant to test the possibilities of the technology.

He was an early benefactor of Yale College, donating some $700,000 to his alma mater, as well as title to the Ellsworth lands in the former Western Reserve.

"What hath God wrought" read the message, suggested by her mother, the wife of Morse's great champion Henry Leavitt Ellsworth.

[21][22] The daughter of Roswell Smith and Anna G. Leavitt married the American artist landscape painter George Inness, Jr.[23]