Albert Lea attended East Tennessee College from 1821 to 1823 but dropped out for financial reasons. He farmed and clerked in a country store until Hugh Lawson White, then a Tennessee congressman, appointed him to West Point in 1827. He graduated from West Point in 1831 and was assigned by the army to scientific and topographical expeditions, in which he generally served as topographer.
He joined an expedition ordered to proceed along the Des Moines River to a certain point and then to strike northward to the Indian village near Lake Pepin on the Mississippi River. On July 28, 1835, the group camped near a lake, and Lea entered the name of the body of water as Chapeau Lake (for its shape) on his topographical map. A few years later, while he was acting secretary of war under President Tyler (a six weeks’ stint), French scholar Jean Nicollet renamed the lake on the official map Lake Albert Lea. The town of Albert Lea, Minnesota, founded in 1835, was also named in honor of the topographer.
Lea’s map of the Blackhawk Purchase referred to the area as the Iowa District, establishing the name of the region and, later, of the state of Iowa. (The word Iowa is an Indian word sometimes translated as beautiful land, and it was attached to a minor tribe of the Plains Indians, the Ioways.) Lea resigned from the army and made an unsuccessful attempt to develop a tract of Iowa land.
He was appointed chief engineer for the state of Tennessee in 1836. His first and only report shows that Lea and his staff ran long lines of precise interconnected altitude determination as the basis for planning transportation routes. (A dissenting report from Assistant State Engineer C. W. Nance probably led to the discontinuance of the office.) He next worked for the federal government as chief clerk in the War Department.
Lea received the master’s degree “in course” (honorary) from the university (then East Tennessee University) in 1844 and joined the faculty as professor of mathematics and natural science. It was Lea who, in 1844, led a move to request the trustees to prescribe uniforms for both students and faculty of the university. From 1849 to 1854, Lea was city engineer for Knoxville, and from 1851 to 1853 he additionally managed an East Tennessee glass manufacturing business. He assisted Bishop Leonidas Polk to select a site for the University of the South at Sewanee and was active in the East Tennessee Educational Association, serving as treasurer in 1850. He moved to Texas around 1855.
He served as an engineering officer in the Confederate army, at the rank of lieutenant. When his youngest son’s US Navy vessel, the Harriet Lane, was battered by the Confederate Bayou City, he rushed to the ship after its capture, but his son was mortally wounded and died. A truce was declared so that Albert Lea could read the Episcopal funeral service at his son’s grave in Galveston. After the war, Lea retired to Galveston and nearby Corsica, Texas, where he died in 1891.