Robert Simpson (1785–1873), physician, merchant, and public official, was born in Charles County, Maryland. After serving in the United States Army as a surgeon’s mate, 1808–12, he settled permanently in Saint Louis, Missouri, where he established a medical practice and opened a drugstore. Simpson also held many public offices in Missouri. He sat in the territorial legislature, 1814–16, and in the lower house of the state assembly, 1822–24; served as Saint Louis’s postmaster, 1815–18, and comptroller, 1839–46; and was a justice of the county court in 1821 and county sheriff, 1826–30. Although opposing the admission of additional slaves into Missouri in 1820, Simpson owned a dozen such individuals in 1830, seven a decade later, and one as late as 1860. A few years prior to his death he possessed real estate worth $60,000 and personal property valued at $1,500 (J. Thomas Scharf, History of Saint Louis City and County [1883]; Frederic L. Billon, Annals of St. Louis in its Territorial Days from 1804 to 1821 [1888]; Heitman, U.S. Army, 1:889; Terr. Papers, 14:701, 792–3; St. Louis Enquirer, 15 Apr. 1820; John Adems Paxton, The St. Louis Directory and Register [Saint Louis, 1821]; Journal of the House of Representatives of the Second General Assembly of the State of Missouri [Saint Charles, 1823], 3; DNA: RG 29, CS, Mo., Saint Louis, 1830, 1840, 1860, 1860 slave schedules, 1870; Lexington [Mo.] Weekly Intelligencer, 14 May 1873; gravestone inscription in Bellefontaine Cemetery, Saint Louis).

The st louis county agricultural society was established in 1822 and held meetings and fairs for several years thereafter (Russell M. Nolen, “The Labor Movement in St. Louis prior to the Civil War,” Missouri Historical Review 34 [1939]: 18; St. Louis Enquirer, 7 June 1824).

On this day Simpson sent a similar letter to James Madison announcing that he had also been elected an honorary member of the society (Madison, Papers, Retirement Ser. description begins William T. Hutchinson, Robert A. Rutland, John C. A. Stagg, and others, eds., The Papers of James Madison, 1962– : Congress. Ser., Pres. Ser., Retirement Ser., Sec. of State Ser. description ends , 3:172).