Morris Ketchum Jesup, banker, philanthropist, president of the American Museum of Natural History and the Peary Arctic Club.
Jesup was founded in 1856 as a depot at the junction of the Macon and Brunswick Railroad and the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad.
The school district includes the nearby unincorporated communities of Littleton, Wise, and Shady Grove in Buchanan County, and Barclay, Canfield, Jubileee, and Spring Creek in Black Hawk County.
The other key works of the modern evolutionary synthesis, whose publication also followed their authors' Jesup lectures, are Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species, Ernst Mayr's Systematics and the Origin of Species and George Gaylord Simpson's Tempo and Mode in Evolution.
Clary is credited with convincing the Macon and Brunswick Railroad to locate its tracks so that they crossed the Atlantic and Gulf rails at Jesup.