PART I: Robert R. Raymond, U.S. Army Engineer

Chapter 1: 1871-1888, Robert R. Raymond’s Childhood and Classic Education

     Robert Rossiter Raymond was born March 5, 1871, in Brooklyn, New York, third son of Charles and Clara Raymond. At the time, Capt. Charles W. Raymond, an 1865 West Point graduate, was stationed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New York City as Secretary of the Board of Engineers.  Robert had two older brothers, and would have four younger brothers and a younger sister. His generation was tenth in a line of male heirs since 1629 when Richard Raymond arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony from England. 

     Robert’s toddler years–he was affectionately called Robby–were as a dependent on the campus of the U.S. Military Academy, the site of George Washington’s historic 1779 headquarters at Fortress West Point, and the most classic of Army duty stations of the day. Just before and just after his birth, Robby’s father ventured overseas, for months at a time, on a couple of scientific reconnaissance missions, the first to Alaska in 1869, the latter in 1874 to the Indian Ocean, treks Robby would learn of in greater detail as he grew. His parents were stationed in California from 1867-69, with Capt. Raymond assigned to Fortress Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. While there he sailed “North to Alaska” to explore the recently acquired territory, specifically the immense, sparsely populated interior, and to provide geographic, biological, geomagnetic and astrophysical reports to the U.S. Congress, as well as a demographic study of the indigenous, who were newly minted American citizens.  

     The 1000-mile trek up the Yukon River also called for a bit of politics and diplomacy: Capt. Raymond found the British encroached on sovereign U.S, land at Fort Yukon, whereupon he struck the Union Flag and hoisted the Stars and Stripes. While the return down-river was an unintended adventure, indeed one of survival, the 1874 trip to the Southern Hemisphere, to the other side of the planet, proved less of a hazard while presenting some novel astronomy, the Transit of Venus across the disk of the Sun. This harmonic phenomenon could help determine the most precise distance between Sun and Earth which the tools of the era would permit (albeit just before the speed of light itself was at long last ascertained.)   

    In post-Civil War America, federal Reconstruction, directed by the U.S. Army, was rebuilding large swaths of the scorched South under the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant (R), a West Point graduate himself, who’d become Abraham Lincoln’s most appreciated and trusted Union general. Grant’s immense post-war popularity led to the executive office and, although cronyism plagued his two terms, the withdrawal in 1877 of martial law from the South only led to the KKK and the Jim Crow Laws of the Dixiecrats (D), which pervaded the Southern states up through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (GOP-sponsored, by the way.)

     In August 1872, Capt. Raymond received orders up the Hudson River (please see the accompanying Currier and Ives print) to West Point where he’d graduated seven years earlier, top of his class, and was assigned as Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, aka the physical sciences.  Robby’s early recollections were the daily bugle calls of Reveille and Retreat, and the frequent report of cannon shot, ceremonial and drill.  West Point featured a state-of-the-art foundry at the time for the development and production of heavy guns and munitions when rifled artillery was coming of age.  Robby lived with his family in junior officer’s quarters, a duplex of white clapboard with a slate roof and wood/coal heated fireboxes (please the historic B&W photograph of Capt. and Mrs. Raymond, five of their children, and his sister, Susan Raymond, and Greb, the family border collie.)

     During the 1870s, Robby and his brothers received their primary education at the post’s Braden’s School for Officers’ Children, taught by the finest youth educators of the day. They were instructed in English vocabulary and spelling, the numbers, basic science, and the story of America’s sovereign century. They were also introduced to the essence of leadership and military skills required to become Army officers. They were taught to speak clearly, read inquisitively, and write convincingly, which could prepare them for a career in the letters or the law. But for engineering and artillery, in secondary school they’d learn to run the calculus, to probe the elements of physics and chemistry, to think and respond geometrically, logically, critically. The boys would become well-versed in these technical disciplines, as the traditions, the humility and responsibility of Duty, Honor, Country, would also become second nature.

     In those years, the Indian Wars raged out on the American frontier, battles that became legendary. Strife between native tribe and Army patrol flared from stockades scattered across the Plains and Rockies, when the Indians weren’t on the warpaths amongst themselves.  Regiments of Blue Jackets were assigned to protect settlers moving into the open tracts of the Louisiana and Gadsden purchases, and the pony soldiers included classmates of Robby’s father. Wrote Don Rickey, Jr. in his 1963 book Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay, “As the Indian Wars wore on, the majority of newly appointed officers were West Point graduates…many soldiers preferred the West Point officers.”  The engagements of the 7th Cavalry and the 1876 debacle of Gen. George Armstrong Custer at Little Bighorn were not lessons from history texts then or the stuff of pulp fiction but were splashed across the front pages of The New York Herald and The New York Times, and likely read to the lads by the light of lanterns and fireplaces. (Custer’s grave is not, as might be supposed, out on a grassy windswept Montana hillside, but at West Point, its 15-foot obelisk just yards from the Raymond family gravesites.)  Despite the dramas depicted in film and fiction of rogue officers, most of the frontier lieutenants and captains, majors, colonels, and generals were highly principled from lessons of personal and professional deportment gleaned from their years at the Academy, a truth that lives on today through the ranks of our modern service school graduates, America’s best and brightest.

     As Robert studied throughout the 1880s, oil, steel and concrete, electricity, telephony, refrigeration and the horseless carriage paced a modern Industrial Revolution. Railroads, tunnels and bridges were engineered by West Pointers displaced by the war’s end, by the muscle of former foot soldiers and waves of immigrants. Track tied population centers together, ferried goods to markets and people to new livelihoods. Wood and coal-fired locomotives and tenders rumbled off production lines with passenger coaches, boxcars, flatcars, tankers. Mail and stores were transported and sorted in baggage cars of the Railway Express Agency and the U.S. Post Office Department between cities and towns, states and coasts. As the nation moved steadily westward, water traffic increased with steamboats, side and stern wheelers chugging along rivers and canals and over lakes and bays, and ocean packets puffed across wide gulfs and hugged coastlines. Screw-driven liners and freighters soon all but obsoleted the tall ships and paddleboats.

     Robert’s father, Charles, had been top student in his 1865 Academy class, so he might have worked designing the roads of iron, but after his stint in academia he initially opted for coastal fortifications and projects along the nation’s watercourses, clearing the way to docksides for ocean-going craft from Boston to Philadelphia.  Later for the increasing traffic through city centers, he did lead in planning rail projects, tubes bored beneath rivers, specifically under the Hudson River at Manhattan carrying the Pennsylvania RR and New York Central into the grand central stations erected in the era. But the maturing youngster chose instead to master the basics of shore batteries and rifled barreling for long range firepower as he began to develop his own career path. This would lead him, prior to his years at the Point, to a two-year prep-school north of Philadelphia.

     In closing this initial chapter of Robert R. Raymond’s life, just as impressionable to a 15-year-old as the stories of his father’s wartime service in the Gettysburg Campaign (temporarily assigned from West Point in the summer of 1863) and his overseas adventures, it’s likely that the father took his son to New York harbor in 1886 for the unveiling of the towering copper-clad Liberty Enlightening the World.  A gift from France, dramatic on a grander scale than exploring the rugged Alaskan wilds or monitoring celestial mechanics, Lady Liberty would become the great icon it is today when Ellis Island Immigration Center (1892-1954) opened six years later.

Next time: Chapter 2: 1889-1899, Robert’s West Point Years and his Junior Officer Career