Solon Robinson, son of Jacob Robinson and Salinda Ladd Robinson, was born at Tolland, Connecticut on 21 October 1803, a descendant of the Reverend John Robinson, one of the leaders (and pastor) of the Separatists from the Church of England in the early 1600's, who immigrated to Leyden, Netherlands and later Plymouth Colony. Orphaned at ten, with a meager education, Solon Robinson was a carpenter's apprentice at fourteen, and a Yankee peddler at eighteen. In 1828, after an abortive real estate venture in Indiana, he opened a general store in Lake County, Indiana, trading with Pottawatomie Indians, and settlers. In 1836, he formed a Squatter's Union there. By 1837, under the by-line “Solon Robinson of Indiana,” he began contributing articles to the Albany Cultivator and other agricultural periodicals. In 1852, the United States Agricultural Society was founded after ten years of effort on Robinson's part. This, in turn, influenced the establishment of the United States Department of Agriculture in 1862. From 1842 to 1852, Robinson toured the states of the Mississippi Valley, the South, and the East, reporting his observations in the Cultivator, the American Agriculturist, and the Prairie Farmer, among others. In 1852, Robinson published an agricultural periodical, The Plow, and at Horace Greeley's behest became agricultural editor of the New York Tribune in 1853. Due to ill health, Robinson moved to Florida about 1868. There he founded the Florida Republican and continued to write until his death in 1880.
