The LSU AgCenter Dean Lee Research and Extension Center near Alexandria is named in his honor, and so is a road south of LSU’s campus in Baton Rouge. Scholarships bearing his name have been awarded to College of Agriculture students.
Dean Lee must have been an important person for his name to be on so many things. So who exactly was he?
First things first: Dean actually wasn’t his first name. It was his job title. Jordan Gray Lee Jr., who often went by J.G., was the dean of the LSU College of Agriculture from 1931 until his death in 1956.
With a background in vocational agriculture, Lee was a respected figure on campus, in the farming community and in Louisiana leadership circles. He guided the college through the Great Depression, World War II and the postwar economic boom — global events that forced American farms to evolve. Universities saw big changes in this time, too, as young veterans enrolled in droves under the G.I. Bill.
Lee wielded considerable power to address the challenges and opportunities of the day. Teaching, research and extension all fell under his purview as dean of the College of Agriculture — an administrative structure that would remain in place until the 1972 creation of the LSU AgCenter.
Lee oversaw the education of a growing student body as well as the Louisiana Cooperative Extension Service and the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station, which instructed farmers, other industry professionals and homemakers statewide on the latest and best practices in their fields. Historical newspaper clippings and university documents paint a picture of a dean who was effective in improving life for students, scientists and farmers alike.
Communication skills were just one of Lee’s assets. The 1943 issue of Gumbo, LSU’s yearbook, noted the dean’s knack for conversation in a caption alongside a black-and-white photo of him bowling.
“He can converse freely with either the learned man of many degrees or the uneducated tiller of the soils,” the yearbook said. “Striving always for the betterment of agricultural science, Dean Lee has done much for the Louisiana farmer.”
Lee’s efforts won the attention of The Progressive Farmer magazine, which named him Agricultural Man of the Year for Louisiana in 1943.
“Leader of youth and leader of men might well be the dual title earned by Dean Lee,” the magazine wrote in announcing its choice for the award. “As probably the most popular dean on the campus at Louisiana State University, he is meeting in the fullest measure his responsibility to the youth of Louisiana who come to the university for training in agriculture and related lines.”
With Lee at the helm, the magazine said, the college provided “the sort of training that will enable young men and young women to have capacity for the greatest service in their families, their communities and their state.”
The college of Lee’s era offered courses in general agriculture, agricultural economics, agronomy, animal industry, dairying, farm equipment management, forestry, home economics, horticulture, poultry industry, rural sociology, veterinary science and vocational education, according to the 1951-1953 LSU General Catalog. The LSU campus then included large tracts of farmland, allowing plenty of space for hands-on experience.
People seeking practical training could enroll in a two-year certificate program at the LSU School of Vocational Agriculture, which opened in 1948 in Chambers, a community south of Alexandria. Students lived, studied and worked on a farm.
Lee stayed in tune with what farmers needed and wanted. He organized the Farm Council to get advice from those in the industry about how the College of Agriculture could better serve constituents. Lee strove to “contribute riches to the state of Louisiana and a better type of living for Louisiana people,” The Progressive Farmer reported.
Lee’s leadership qualities frequently yielded praise in the local press. He also served as chairman of the State Soil and Water Conservation Committee and the LSU Athletic Council.
Leadership, agriculture and LSU were all in Lee’s family tree. Born near Farmerville in Union Parish in 1885, Lee was named after his uncle, Major Jordan Gray Lee, even going by “Major” as a nickname.
Following in the footsteps of his uncle, who himself had a storied career that left a mark on the university, the younger Lee enrolled in LSU to study agriculture. Later, in 1906, he landed a job running the dairy at one of the branches of the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station.
He pursued additional studies at Iowa State College and the University of Missouri and became a professor, accepting his first teaching position in 1909 at the Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute — today called the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. There, he launched an agriculture department.
In 1919, he came back to LSU to teach vocational agriculture, helping “train hundreds of future agricultural teachers, county agents and experiment station workers,” according to an obituary in his hometown paper, The Gazette. “He continued his teaching to the time of his death.”
Lee’s passing was front-page news in the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate on April 29, 1956. The article ran alongside coverage of Baton Rouge Mayor-President Jesse L. Webb Jr. and two others being killed in a plane crash in Michigan.
Coping with extended illness in the months preceding his death, Lee had made plans to retire in June 1956, and the LSU Board of Supervisors had already chosen a successor: J. Norman Efferson. An economist and Experiment Station director, Efferson would later become the first chancellor of a new campus dedicated to research and extension. It was called the LSU Center for Agricultural Sciences and Rural Development — or, as it is known today, the LSU AgCenter.
Lee, 70, died just a few days before his retirement banquet was to be held in Baton Rouge.
It didn’t take long for officials to find ways to honor the revered college dean. The School of Vocational Agriculture near Alexandria was quickly renamed the Dean Lee Agricultural Center. It transformed over the years from a residential teaching farm to what is now the Dean Lee Research and Extension Center — one of the AgCenter’s biggest facilities, encompassing 3,000 acres of fields dedicated to row crop trials and livestock operations.
In Baton Rouge, Dean Lee Drive connects Nicholson Drive to Ben Hur Road, which runs through the AgCenter’s Doyle Chambers Central Research Station. Dean Lee Drive showed up on Baton Rouge street maps as early as 1958.
Out of the AgCenter’s 14 research stations around Louisiana, only four are named after someone. Chambers was an Experiment Station director who played a key role in making the AgCenter an autonomous campus within the LSU system. The H. Rouse Caffey Rice Research Station near Crowley is named for a former AgCenter chancellor, and the Bob R. Jones-Idlewild Research Station near Clinton honors a landowner and outdoorsman who helped establish the station.
Olivia McClure is a writer, editor, photographer and videographer in AgCenter Communications.
This article appears in the summer 2024 edition of Louisiana Agriculture.
Jordan G. Lee Jr. was featured in the 1947 edition of Gumbo, the LSU yearbook. Photo courtesy of LSU Photograph Collection, Louisiana State University Archives, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge.
Jordan G. Lee Jr., the dean of the LSU College of Agriculture, bowls in a feature on the university administration from the 1943 edition of Gumbo, the LSU yearbook. Photo courtesy of LSU Photograph Collection, Louisiana State University Archives, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge.
The Dean Lee Research and Extension Center in Alexandria is named for Jordan G. Lee Jr., the respected dean of the LSU College of Agriculture from 1931 until his death in 1956. Photo by Randy Price