The Raymonds of Cambridge – 100 Years

Tom Raymond, CCS Class of 1964

Chapter 3: 1900-1912, Advancing Career Path and the Growing Family 

Turn of the Century, 1900

    1st Lieutenant Robert R. Raymond, an 1893 graduate of West Point, was seven years into what would be a 30-year career in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  President William McKinley was reelected in 1900 but was assassinated the next year by another deranged man, recalling the murders of Abraham Lincoln (1865) and James Garfield (1881.)  This time, though, the killer was not shot nor hanged but, in keeping with the wonders of modern technology, strapped to a chair and electrically dispatched from society. Our 25th president is remembered today in a pile of granite and glaciers in Alaska, first named in 1896 by a gold prospector, then in 1917 by Uncle Sam.  Mount McKinley (Denali), as we all learned in school, is North America’s highest point.  VP Teddy Roosevelt stepped into the Oval Office, gave the Executive Mansion a fresh coat of white paint and the moniker The White House on his stationery. The name stuck.

The Gulf Coast, 1902-1903

     By 1902, Lt. Raymond was in charge of the U.S. Engineer Office in Montgomery, Alabama, and through June, 1903, he worked on various river channel projects in that state and in Georgia waters.  He engineered harbor improvements in Florida, at Apalachicola and Pensacola, as well as coastal defense fortifications throughout the region.  Robert traveled with his family to and from his new posts by rail through the Deep South and aboard military transport along the Atlantic Coast and into the Gulf of Mexico.

     During the early 1900s, talk around Army engineering circles and throughout the nation and the hemisphere was rekindled interest in a canal across the Isthmus of Panama.  This would reclaim a project abandoned by the French a few decades earlier when tropical diseases decimated the work crews. This northern-most state of Columbia won independence with no little help from Teddy Roosevelt’s bully pulpit and the Great White Fleet that kept the Columbian Navy at bay. Thus, the new Panamanian government eagerly signed a 99-year deal with Washington to establish the Canal Zone, an American territory.  

     Robert’s father, Charles, was on the short list of engineers considered to head up the project but he begged off due to declining health. He offered his support, though, for his good friend Col. George Washington Goethals, USACE, and the digging began in 1904, a project that would take a decade.  But not before malaria and yellow fever were brought under control through modern medicine and the U.S. Army Medical Corps, in particular through the use of quinine, a natural alkaloid with fever-reducing, pain-killing, anti-inflammatory properties.

Fort Leavenworth, KS, 1903-1907

     In early 1903, Lt. Raymond was promoted to captain, Corps of Engineers.  He drew orders in mid-year to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, assigned to 1st Engineer Battalion, Company D, through September, 1905.  That year the Raymonds welcomed their fifth child, Richard, into the fold.  Their second son was the first Richard in the line of male heirs, eleven generations, since Richard Raymond arrived from England at Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony c.1629.  This fact was not lost on Robert from his copy of the Samuel Raymond family genealogy of 1886, and the lad would bill himself throughout his years, legitimately, as Richard Raymond II.

     In 1903, the world was abuzz with news from a wind-swept sandbar along North Carolina’s Outer Banks.  At a place called Kitty Hawk, two brothers named Wright, Wilber and Orville, were down from their Ohio bicycle shop to execute gasoline-powered flight for a time and distance to make the books.  Once again, as in the prior century when steam locomotion first took him faster than a horse’s gallop, swifter than a cutter slicing the waves, mankind pivoted on a single event.  He joined the birds for more than a buoyant float on air since he’d now plane the skies, climb, bank and dive on invisible currents of wind.  A transformational nexus for civilization, the machine would also prove a source of steel rain with the birth of airborne warfare; one of Robert’s grandsons would pilot an American bomber over Italy in WWII. 

     At Fort Leavenworth in 1904, Robert and Blossom posed with the family, he in the photo in the upper left, she lower right.  Joining them were two of her sisters, Gertrude and Harriet, his brother Jack (Capt. John Raymond, USMA 1897, U.S. Cavalry), and the five Raymond children, Caroline, Robert Jr., Katherine, toddler Clara, and infant Richard.

     Along the Missouri River those years Robert often stepped into the outdoors with his trusty hounds, his rod and gun in hand.  Mallard, pintail and canvasback, rainbow, brook and brown, none had a chance if straying into his field of view as his eyesight and skills rewarded his patience and stealth, skills later honed across the fields and streams of Washington County and the region, with a passion passed on to a number of his progeny.

Bay Area Earthquake, 1906

    On April 18, 1906, Northern California’s San Andreas Fault slipped, in some places 20 lateral feet along the surface.  The jolts and fires turned downtown San Francisco into charred rubble and the Army was charged with assisting local police in restoring order by imposing martial law throughout the Bay Area: “Looters shot on sight.”  

     Capt. Raymond received orders to report to the Commanding General, San Francisco, so he hopped a Pullman to the coast, a three-day ride. The steam-powered combine, a dozen coaches and baggage cars, rolled past fields of Kansas corn to mile-high Denver, snaked over the massive Rockies, headed down steep canyons, and rumbled into Salt Lake City.  The steamer puffed past the alkaline lake bed where the Golden Spike was driven back in 1869.  Robert must have reflected on the significance of that site and place in engineering history, the first transcontinental route.  The train lumbered across the Basin and Range province where thousands of wagons and walkers had plodded along decades before, pioneers bound for the Promised Land, yet some perishing along the desiccated hardscape.  The iron horse soon powered up to the crest of the High Sierras at Donner Pass, where that party had met disaster in 1846, then eased down into Sacramento and along the Delta to Oakland.

     Upon arrival, Capt. Raymond’s activities in the Bay Area included drafting blue prints for emergency living facilities for the relief crews and the civilian populations displaced by the quake.  In the photo he’s seated in the center flanked by fellow officers and civilian members of the Relief Camp, Oakland.

     With his trip west, Robert also likely took the opportunity to inspect the coastal batteries of concrete embedded around the harbor’s hillsides, to observe first-hand recent installations of equipment he’d co-invented, the Taylor-Raymond ammunition hoist system.  He remained on locale for several months before returning to his permanent station in Kansas. His final assignment at Fort Leavenworth was with 3rd Engineer Battalion, Company K, until December of 1907.

     Displaced for months from hearth and home, Robert and Blossom corresponded by post and planned a special vacation after his return from California. They traveled out to two of the nation’s more notable National Parks, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, and as Rob was a skilled photographer, the excursion added to his portfolio of settings in the natural world and subjects of human interest.  Today his century-old photo albums in black and white are scattered around the family.

Washington, DC: 1908-1909

     Completing his tour at Fort Leavenworth, Captain Raymond took leave at the end of 1907, through the Christmas and New Year holidays into mid-January of 1908.  For much of that year he was stationed in Denver as Chief Engineer of the Army Department of Colorado where, in July, he was promoted to major. In September he received orders to Washington Barracks, District of Columbia (later Fort McNair), as Instructor at the U.S. Army Engineer School. The Raymonds settled into quarters along Officer’s Row where the sixth child, third son, Charles, was born in 1909.  (Decades later, in 1958, Charles would drive his 12-year old son past the old homestead where, just around the corner, lay a set of tennis courts.  This was a site of subtle historic significance, that of the swift and certain justice of 1865, the gallows executions of Mary Surrett and fellow co-conspirators for the assassination of President Lincoln.

     For a generation, the well-heeled had puttered about in horseless carriages, but in 1908 Henry Ford put the whole world on wheels with his novel assembly line for an automobile that you’d order “in any color as long as it was black.”   The Army likewise began procuring its own fleet of this modern mode of transport, consigned to military motor pools on the posts and forts across the land.  In time and with rank Robert would have his own personal staff car.

“Three Cheers”

     On February 18, 1909, Robert and Blossom, as noted, welcomed Charles Walker Raymond into the family, named for his grandfather, Charles, an 1865 graduate of the USMA. The next day, Major Raymond stood in a reception line at the White House, the Farewell Reception of the outgoing president, Theodore Roosevelt.  The major was unaccompanied by his wife, so the commander in chief asked the whereabouts of Mrs. Raymond and the officer replied that she was at home with a newborn. The following day a signed photograph of the chief was delivered by Army courier to the Raymond quarters, with a personal message from the old boy himself penned in the lower border: 

          Three cheers for Mrs. Major Raymond and the sixth baby! Theodore Roosevelt Feb. 20^th 1909

     The next presidency, that of William Taft, he of no military experience but considerable girth, kept the GOP in the White House for four more years, 1909-13. His legacy would be the 16th Amendment which entered the public eye for the first time in 1913, a permanent federal income tax, with little chance ever to unravel its tentacles, uh, rescind its complexities.

Wilmington, DE: 1910-1912

    Major Raymond served as Instructor at the Army Engineer School until February of 1910, when new orders were issued for Wilmington, Delaware.  He was assigned as District Engineer for projects along the Delaware River, yet another posting for Robert in his father’s footsteps in river and bay engineering.  Serving through December, 1912, he was also a board member responsible for the Intra-Coastal Waterway from Massachusetts to North Carolina, the Boston-Beaufort Section. And on August 21, 1912, Robert and Blossom were blessed with their seventh child, Virginia Woodruff Raymond. They were parishioners at this time at Trinity Episcopal Church in Wilmington, continuing the long family tradition as active Christians.

     The federal territories of New Mexico and Arizona attained statehood in 1912 and the long standing 48-star flag was unfurled for the first time on July 4th.  This would fly over the battlefields and hostile seas of two world wars and the post-war ’50s.  The banner remained our national standard for 47 years, until replaced with 49, then 50 stars, when Alaska entered the Union in 1959, Hawai’i in ’60.

     The year 1912 marked also another noted achievement for the young century, the launch of the superliner Titanic, heralded then as unsinkable but immediately star-crossed by spectacular blunders in engineering and navigation.  One day in mid-April, The New York Times and others headlined that a chunk of ice had slashed open the big boat as it steamed the night before over the frigid Atlantic, plunging the floating palace and hundreds of souls into the deep. The mystery lay dormant for the rest of Rob Raymond’s life, until the ship’s discovery decades later at 12,460’.  The recovery of samples from the ship and detailed failure analyses now indict popped hull rivets and the steering system as likely culprits.  Literature and legend give the haunting saga continued life today like few other tales of our planet’s watery realm.

Next Time: Chapter 4: 1913-1920, Expanded Duties, Overseas Assignment, and The Great War