John Francis Queeny (August 17, 1859 – March 19, 1933) was an American businessman, known for founding Monsanto Chemical Works (later

Monsanto The Monsanto Company () was an American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation founded in 1901 and headquartered in Creve Coeur, Missouri. Monsanto's best known product is Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide, developed in th ...

) in

St. Louis St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...

Missouri Missouri is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Ranking List of U.S. states and territories by area, 21st in land area, it is bordered by eight states (tied for the most with Tennessee ...

, on September 26, 1901, with $5,000. He named the company for his wife, Olga Mendez Monsanto.

Early life

Born in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...

, he attended school for six years until the

Great Chicago Fire The Great Chicago Fire was a conflagration that burned in the American city of Chicago during October 8–10, 1871. The fire killed approximately 300 people, destroyed roughly of the city including over 17,000 structures, and left more than 10 ...

forced him to seek full-time employment at age 12. Queeny got a job with Tolman and King for $2.50 per week.

Career

He moved to St. Louis in 1897 to work for Meyer Brothers Drug Company, one of the largest wholesale pharmaceutical companies at the time. Two years later, he spent his life savings in purchasing a sulfur refinery; it burned down the next day. Two years after that, he founded Monsanto Chemical Works, and began producing

saccharin Saccharin (''aka'' saccharine, Sodium sacchari) is an artificial sweetener with effectively no nutritional value. It is about 550 times as sweet as sucrose but has a bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations. Saccharin is u ...

e, which he sold to Meyer Brothers. He started to turn a profit in 1905, but it was not until 1906 that he left Meyer Brothers to work for Monsanto full-time. In 1928, Queeny retired from Monsanto and was succeeded by his son,

Edgar Edgar is a commonly used English given name, from an Anglo-Saxon name ''Eadgar'' (composed of '' ead'' "rich, prosperous" and ''gar'' "spear"). Like most Anglo-Saxon names, it fell out of use by the later medieval period; it was, however, rev ...

. The company grew to become one of the largest producers of engineered crops in the United States by the 1970s. In 2018, Monsanto was acquired by

Bayer Bayer AG (, commonly pronounced ; ) is a German multinational corporation, multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company and one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Headquartered in Leverkusen, Bayer's areas of busi ...

for US$66 billion.

Personal life

He married Olga Mendez Monsanto with whom he had two children, including Edgar Monsanto Queeny. Queeny died in 1933 in

and was buried at the

Bellefontaine Cemetery Bellefontaine Cemetery is a nonprofit, non-denominational cemetery and arboretum in St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1849 as a rural cemetery, Bellefontaine is home to a number of architecturally significant monuments and mausoleums such as the ...

References

External links

* American manufacturing businesspeople Monsanto 1859 births 1933 deaths Businesspeople from Chicago 19th-century American businesspeople {{US-business-bio-1850s-stub