Ransdell sponsored the Ransdell Act, which created the National Institutes of Health. Later years and legacy In 1920, Ransdell founded a printing firm in Washington, D.C., at a time when members of Congress could run businesses while serving in office. When his Senate tenure ended in 1931, Ransdell returned to Lake Providence to engage in real estate and growing cotton and pecans. He was a member of the board of supervisors of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge from 1940 to 1944 during the administration of Governor Sam H. Jones. Ransdell died in Lake Providence and is interred there at Lake Providence Cemetery. At the time of his death, he was the last living Senator to have been elected by a state legislature. Ransdell was a great-uncle of Frank Voelker Jr., a Lake Providence attorney who chaired the former Louisiana State Sovereignty Commission during the administration of Governor Jimmie Davis and then ran unsuccessfully for governor in the 1963 Democratic gubernatorial primary, withdrawing before the balloting. Frank Voelker Sr., judge of the Sixth Judicial District from 1937 until his death in 1963, was married to Ransdell's niece, Isabel, and was hence a son-in-law of Judge Francis Ransdell. Ransdell's great-great nephew was the New Orleans entrepreneur and philanthropist David Ransdell Voelker. Following Hurricane Katrina, Democratic Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco named David Voelker to the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Blanco's successor and past opponent, Republican Bobby Jindal, elevated Voelker as chairman of the authority. In 2008, though he had been identified previously as a "longtime, diehard Republican", David Voelker was the largest donor in Louisiana to Democrat Barack H. Obama of Illinois, having given the then neophyte presidential candidate $80,000, according to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets in Washington, D.C. Ransdell named the community of Elmwood southwest of Lake Providence, where he owned much of the land, for his boyhood plantation in Rapides parish. In 1976, more than thirty years after Ransdell's death, St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church in Lake Providence moved into a new building on a lot which the former senator had willed to the congregation. The new location at 207 Scarborough Street, is directly across the street from the earlier structure where Ransdell and his family had long worshiped. A biography of Ransdell was written in 1951 by Adras LaBorde, long-time managing editor of the Alexandria Daily Town Talk. References External links Cemetery Memorial by La-Cemeteries 1858 births 1954 deaths Politicians from