University of Virginia Library

JOHN PATTEN EMMET

Emmet Residence House and Emmet
Street (the portion of Route 29 which
passes by the university grounds) are
named in honor of John Patten Emmet,
Professor of Natural History in the original
Faculty. He was born in Dublin 8 April
1796, in a family of Irish patriots. His
uncle, Robert Emmet, was a martyr to the
cause; and his father, Thomas Addis
Emmet, after five years of imprisonment,
emigrated to New York. The young Emmet,
eight years old on arrival in America,
attended a classical school on Long Island,
and was appointed a cadet to West Point.
Ill health, which hampered him throughout
his life, necessitated withdrawal before
graduation. But while still a cadet student
he had been appointed an assistant instructor
in Mathematics. A year was spent in the
milder climate of southern Italy, during
which the range of his interests extended to
music, painting, and sculpture; and a frolicsome
Celtic trait was revealed in his participation

in a Naples Carnival, cleverly
disguised as the Devil—so realistically, that
he was well-nigh mobbed. On his return to
New York, he studied medicine at the College
of Physicians and Surgeons, and for
homework he fitted up a private chemistry
laboratory. He received an M.D. degree in
1822, and started the practice of medicine
in Charleston, South Carolina.

It was a course of popular lectures in
Chemistry, given in Charleston, that
brought young Emmet to the attention of
Thomas Jefferson and ultimately led to his
appointment in the initial Faculty at the
University of Virginia. His professorship of
Natural History was in the third session
altered to that of Chemistry and Materia
Medica. He was enthusiastic over the University
and over his teaching; and he was a
man of marked ingenuity, in his experiments
for useful devices, for the utilization
of soils and minerals, and for the introduction
or improvement of fruits and vegetables.

In Pavilion I, where Emmet lived at

first, he kept as pets snakes, a white owl,
and a friendly bear. But this menagerie was
cheerfully discontinued upon his marriage
in 1829 to Mary Byrd Tucker, a niece of
George Tucker, Professor of Moral Philosophy.
Later the couple were permitted
to move from the Lawn to a considerable
tract of land west of the University on
which the house still known as "Morea"
was erected. The word is derived from the
Latin morus meaning mulberry tree, which
Emmet introduced for his silkworm culture.
"Morea" has recently been taken over
by the University for use as a guest house.
There Professor Emmet could freely pursue
his horticultural experimentation—
thus producing something like the botanical
garden which had figured in Jefferson's
original planning. But in 1842 persistent
ill health made advisable his withdrawal
to Florida. There a mitigation of
the illness resulted in a hopeful return to
New York. Six weeks later, however, on 15
August 1842, he died, in his forty-seventh
year. He was buried in New York. There
were three children, two sons, of whom the
younger died in his eighth year, and one
daughter. The elder son, bearing his grandfather's
name, Thomas Addis Emmet, became
a distinguished physician in New
York, and was the author of an impressive
folio volume on the Emmet Family.