Researching John Leavitt

John F. Leavitt was born to the sea. His Maine family were sailors, as reflected in early photographs showing his seven-year-old sister Syrena and him at the wheel of the Alice S. Wentworth in Lynn, Massachusetts. Leavitt himself was a crew member on several coastal schooners in Maine beginning in 1918 until about 1925, the tail end of the schooner era.

Later in life, the boatbuilder and artist began working for the esteemed Mystic Seaport museum, where he continued painting and writing about his love: the sea and the boats built to withstand it. At Mystic, Leavitt worked as an assistant curator, applying his knowledge of sailing vessels to the museum's collection.

He continued to paint and write, and his watercolor and oil paintings are in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, and other museum and private collections. Leavitt painted everything from Old Ironsides to the Gloucester fishing schooner L. A. Dunton. In 1952 the maritime artist's works were the subject of a one-man show at the William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, Maine. Leavitt continued to write about the technical aspects of the shipbuilding industry, including the monograph Shipbuilding in Colonial Connecticut.

Leavitt's best-known work was Wake of the Coasters, published in 1970 by Wesleyan University Press. Drawing on his work for the Maritime Historical Association of Mystic, Connecticut, Leavitt sketched a biography of the smaller New England coasting schooners in a work now considered a classic among aficionados. On the opening page of his work, Leavitt's elegiac tone towards the noble wind-driven ships of the past was evident. "The dude cruisers are only maritime ghosts in an atomic world", Leavitt wrote wistfully of the old schooners.

In his works, both on canvas and paper, Leavitt's passion for the old schooners was palpable. "There was a time when spars and rigging made a commonplace pattern against the Maine sky", Leavitt wrote in Wake of the Coasters. "It was in 1938 when the last cargo-carrying schooner was launched in the State of Maine, yet today there seem to be very few who remember when the reaches and thoroughfares swarmed with coasting schooners. Perhaps that is because the sight was so taken for granted."

Leavitt's books were often the exception in the world of cool rigging-and-spars nautical writing. In Wake, for instance, Leavitt revisited the sinking of the 1928 sinking of the schooner William Booth by its much larger counterpart, the Helen Barnet Gring, an enormous four-masted coasting schooner built in 1919 by Robert L. Bean in Camden, Maine, for the Boston shipping firm of Crowell and Thurlow. The three-masted Booth, according to Leavitt, was cut down and sunk by the Gring. In Leavitt's hands, these arcane tales of the sea were rendered with the passion of Herman Melville.

Leavitt published a number of other books, most accompanied by his own artworks of the great coasting schooners. The Charles W. Morgan, published in 1973, delineated the history of the restored Morgan, the last wooden whaling ship, anchored at Mystic Seaport. The work included more than 80 photographs of the restored vessel, documenting the ship's crew at work on the vessel.

In an unblinking assessment of the hazards of sea travel, Leavitt noted the number of crew deaths aboard the schooner. "The late author John F. Leavitt chronicled the life of the vessel", wrote Leslie Rule in her Ghost in the Mirror, "referencing archived ship logs to provide much of the information, including many fatalities."

The papers of John Leavitt from 1966–74, during his time at Mystic as the Seaport's Associate Curator, are collected at the G. W. Blunt White Library at the Mystic Seaport Museum. The artist, writer and curator's photographs are in the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. John Leavitt died on May 25, 1974, in Mystic, Connecticut.

John H. Leavitt was the son of Col. Roger Hooker Leavitt, a businessman, politician and Massachusetts abolitionist. Young Leavitt studied civil engineering, and early in his career was contracted by John Roebling, the builder of the Brooklyn Bridge, to survey a large tract of land. Having gained some measure of confidence in his abilities, Leavitt struck out for the west in 1854, reaching Dubuque, Iowa, where he remained for less than a year before settling at Waterloo, Iowa.

While in Dubuque, Leavitt married Caroline Clark Ware of Granville, Illinois. Shortly after his move to Waterloo, the young engineer decided on a change of career, and became a banker. Within a decade he founded his own private banking firm.

Several years later, on the admission of a new partner, the sole proprietorship of Leavitt's bank necessitated a change of name to Leavitt & Lusch. Subsequently, on the addition of another partner, the bank became known as Leavitt, Johnson & Lusch. On the retirement of partner A. T. Lusch, the business became known as Leavitt & Johnson Bank, under which name the firm operated from 1876 to 1898, when the firm was reorganized as Leavitt & Johnson National Bank, with a capital stock of $100,000.

John Hooker Leavitt worked at the firm for 50 years, during the various permutations of the corporation's name. He served as president of the institution, located at Commercial and Fourth Streets in downtown Waterloo, until 1901.

In 1871, Leavitt was elected to the Iowa Senate, where he was engaged in the fight to prevent the return of James Harlan to the United States Senate after his service as a member of Abraham Lincoln's cabinet. A staunch Republican, Leavitt served only one term in the Iowa State Senate.

After leaving the state senate, Leavitt devoted his time to his business affairs, as well as his membership in the Congregational Church of Waterloo. He was an early benefactor of Talladega College, Alabama's oldest historically black college, and in 1903 he joined the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield, Massachusetts, where his father Roger Hooker Leavitt had served as vice president.

John H. Leavitt's brother William also lived in Waterloo, but eventually relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hon. John Hooker Leavitt and his wife had five children: Roger of Cedar Falls, Iowa; Joseph, who lived in Illinois; Mary Leavitt Davison, wife of Robert A. Davison; Lucy O. Leavitt; and Grace, who married Thomas Cascaden Jr.

John H. Leavitt's father, abolitionist Roger Hooker Leavitt, died in Waterloo in 1885 while on a visit to his son. Col. Roger Hooker Leavitt's body was returned to Charlemont, Massachusetts, longtime home of the family, for burial. John Hooker Leavitt died at Waterloo in 1906.

Leavitt ran the family-owned trading partnership, and was one of the most prominent businessmen of his age until financial reverses caused the bankruptcy of the firm. In spite of the financial reverses, Leavitt and his wife went on to help raise their granddaughter painter Beaux after her mother died shortly after she was born and her French father fled back to France.