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The Raymonds of
Cambridge – 100 Years |
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College Preparation Robert R. Raymond’s father, Army engineer Charles W. Raymond, changed duty stations several times during the 1880s, to New Orleans and Los Angeles, then on to Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. The family sought stability for Rob’s preparation for West Point, so after two years of public high school education at his father’s duty stations, the lad’s uncle Ros (Rossiter W. Raymond, Civil War Union officer, U.S. government mining engineer) offered to pay the tuition to a private college preparatory school. His junior and senior years were spent at the Hill School in Pottstown, PA, from 1887-1889, and the last spring there he took and passed the West Point entrance exams.
West Point Cadet: 1889-1893 On June 15, 1889, with a Congressional appointment from Brooklyn, Robert arrived at the campus of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which sits on a broad plain above the Hudson River’s west bank, a natural bench that hugs the Catskills Water Gap 50 miles above New York City. He was assigned a room with a classmate in one of the cadet barracks and for four years he’d dine precisely on time at the mess hall. Scattered across the campus were buildings from the antebellum era, as seen in the photograph, ca. 1860. This is one of the barracks featuring castellated towers, the logo design of the Corps of Engineers. Beginning in 1892, though, the aging buildings were razed and replaced with those of the Modern Gothic style seen today.
Cadet Raymond attended lectures, studied and recited lessons in a variety of classrooms. He pursued archival research in the cadet library, experimental research in the laboratory, and performed class assignments at his desk in his room, often past midnight, with reveille at 5 a.m. In the decade prior to his arrival on campus, the Cadet Code of Honor was issued, modeled on ancient moral law and Holy Scripture: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate anyone who does.” (The whistleblower, often shunned, is nonetheless necessary to level the playing field.) This guide for personal deportment was drafted, not by the administration, but by the students themselves, leaders that included Robert’s older brother Allen D. Raymond. Rob’s own leadership skills were soon recognized and he was given command of a platoon in his company; see the photograph with Raymond standing at center.
Closing the American Frontier In 1890, Robert’s second year at The Point, the Indian Wars came to an end, and an important paper was issued from the campus of the University of Wisconsin in 1893. Professor F. J. Turner, citing the 1890 Bureau of Census report, noted that a western frontier boundary would no longer be designated by population, effectively closing the demographic. With that the entrepreneurial spirit that drove the pioneers’ survival in a raw land would shift to a new sense of enterprise that would launch the modern industrial revolution and propel the nation onto the world stage at the turn of the century. Technology would improve everyday lives and assist in new environmental causes, saving, for example, the buffalo and the whale from extinction (yet the fate of the passenger pigeon.) The first public parklands were established, national, state, and municipal. One of Robert’s forebears had a hand in creating Yosemite National Park, his great-uncle Ward (Israel W. Raymond), a 49er and a Pacific Coast steamboat pilot who plied the waters between Panama and Nicaragua to San Francisco, from the 1850s to the 1880s. Furthermore, Robert’s Uncle Ros, his prep-school patron, toured many a western mountain and mine during the era, drawn into the debate between the nation’s post-Civil War monetary standard, gold vs. silver. Rossiter and Israel are remembered today in the High Sierras on the USGS map with, respectively, Raymond Peak and Mount Raymond. By the Gay Nineties (now there’s an anachronism), young Raymond was aspiring to carry on such a family legacy through his own technical and military training. The United States was a generation beyond the Civil War and Reconstruction yet the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans, still held sway across the land. Marching bands and orchestras, the new Victrola in the parlor, played the anthems of John Philip Sousa and others. Cadet Raymond paraded to the bright sounds of the brass and reed, the commanding presence of the drum on “The Plain”, the broad expanse of grass for cadet drill and sporting events. In the fall of 1890, Robert watched the first ever Army-Navy football game from the sidelines, while his own athletic ability positioned him at first base on the diamond in the springs to follow. His worn leather glove was passed down father to son, eventually to be donated to Cooperstown, a relic of West Point’s early role in the national pastime. (Abner Doubleday, Union officer at Fort Sumter, noted general at Gettysburg, for decades was credited as the inventor of baseball, a myth recently dispelled by recovered records.) But don’t look for Rob Raymond’s mitt on display with Lou Gehrig’s; consider instead the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Holy Ark of the Covenant was boxed and dumped on an obscure shelf in the recesses of a dingy warehouse.
A Modern America Emerges With the closing of the frontier, a new American social structure unfolded, suburbia, a buffer zone between high density cores and the hardwood forests and open tracts of the truck gardens of New Jersey and the dairy farms of upstate New York. Inner cities teemed with tenements in Irish neighborhoods, Little Italys and Chinatowns. Trolley lines began to radiate from urban centers to stately mansions behind hedgerows and broad lawns, America’s answer to European castles. Housing bankers and CEOs, doctors and lawyers, they fed on oil and steel, on the railroads and new technologies like electric lights, refrigeration and telecommunications. Dirt roads and gravel streets were laid with cobblestone and brick, and broad boulevards and highways were paved with concrete and asphalt for new fleets of horseless transportation. Eastern seaboard cities mushroomed, though the first skyscraper rose in Chicago in 1885, not New York. By 1898, the municipalities of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the districts of Queens and Staten Island merged into a single New York, New York (“the town so great they named it twice.”) Newark and Jersey City melded into the nation’s metroplex while Boston swallowed Cambridge-Charlestown and Germantown fused with Philadelphia. For the U.S. Military Academy’s upper classmen, occasional weekend getaways to the bright lights were but an hour by rail or ferry. On the streets and in the ballrooms of Gotham City, Robert and his fellow cadets proudly wore their stately uniforms.
Cadet Raymond’s Academic Record Robert’s four years of study, before they called it STEM and liberal arts, included civil and military engineering, ordnance-gunnery, drawing, civil and military law, history, English, Spanish, and French. Of 1795 possible meritorious points, he achieved a cumulative total of 1683, which awarded him the #5 ranking in his class of 51 graduates. He’d be the 3,516th graduate in the Academy’s 91-year history since its 1802 founding.
Early Career Path and Marriage: 1893-1899 Upon graduation from West Point on June 12, 1893, Robert was commissioned as Additional 2nd Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. After a short leave, he was ordered to report to his first duty station, the Army engineering facilities at Willetts Point, Queens, NY. He served with Company A, Battalion of Engineers until 1896. He was Supervising Engineer for the construction of Battery Gansevoort at Fort Slocum, part of the coastal defenses for the City and Harbor of New York. At Willetts Point, Robert met Blossom King, born October 3, 1876 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the daughter of Army engineer Lt. Col. William Rice King (USMA 1863) of Eagle Bridge, NY, and Virginia Woodruff King. Although christened Agnes at birth, her parents affectionately called her their “little Blossom”, a name she preferred and formally assumed at age 16 upon baptism and confirmation. (She died in 1960, age 84, at Mary McClellan Hospital.) Robert and Blossom became engaged and were married on April 16, 1895, at Willetts Point. Robin and Blos (pet names for each other) were at home in a junior officer’s residence on the post. On October 25, 1895, he was promoted to full grade 2nd Lieutenant. From 1896 to early 1898 Lt. Raymond was assigned to the engineering facility at nearby New York City (Manhattan) reporting to a Majorp Adams. His unit was assigned to the construction and improvement of forts Schuyler in the Bronx, Totten in Queens, and Wadsworth on Staten Island, and the submarine mine defenses of the Narrows flanking the city. The Raymond’s first two children were born then, Caroline at Willetts Point in 1896, and Katherine at Ft. Schuyler in 1897. Robert was promoted to 1st Lieutenant on July 5, 1898, and received orders to Boston, MA (through 1901.) He continued work on harbor fortifications and mine defenses, reporting to a Colonel Mansfield and later a Colonel Suter. The couple’s first son, Robert Rossiter (Jr.), was born at Ashmont, MA in 1899. In May of 1898, Blossom and the family received the distressing news that her father, William, age 59, passed away while on duty in Illinois. He’d receive full graveside military honors at his West Point burial.
American Interests Offshore At the onset of Lt. Raymond’s active duty career in the mid-1890s, several foreign island groups were receiving attention from the federal government in Washington. William McKinley (R), another young, distinguished Union Army major during the Civil War, was elected U.S. President in 1896. At the time the monarchy of a then-independent Hawai’i was wrestled away from the locals by private American businessmen interested in the prospective riches of sugar cane and pineapples, with the bonus of a strategic port for the U.S. fleet. By 1898 Hawai’i was an American possession. The ethics may spark debate today but the issue poses both a moral and legal dilemma since a trillion-dollar skyline now towers over Waikiki. It’s also the site of one of the most dramatic events in American history: Pearl Harbor speaks for itself. Also, in 1898 the battleship USS Maine entered Cuban waters, Havana’s harbor, again to protect vested American business there during Cuba’s latest uprising against mother Spain. The ship mysteriously blew up, killing 260 American sailors and officers, probably an accident—yet fodder still today for conspiracy theorists—but this was the fuse to ignite the Spanish-American War, for a short four months. The conflict also launched the latest American hero, Theodore Roosevelt, into the public eye after he rallied his Rough Riders, U.S. Volunteers, up San Juan Hill to victory. One Regular Army soldier in that assault was Robert Raymond’s younger brother, Cavalry Lt. John C. Raymond (USMA 1897.) Teddy Roosevelt himself would enter Raymond family lore in another capacity in a few years. After 400 years, Spain was tossed from the hemisphere as well as the Western Pacific. Cuba gained independence while the U.S. added territory in the Philippines, Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Lt. Raymond remained attuned to these events through daily Army communiqués and the public press and was aware of overseas projects possibly awaiting his assignment. His father, Charles, a lieutenant colonel still on active duty in the Corps was in contact with his son with suggestions and encouragement.
Next Time: Chapter 3: 1900-1912, Advancing Career Path and the Growing Raymond Family WC: 1927 |
