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The Raymonds of
Cambridge – 100 Years
Chapter 5: 1920-1929, the Robert R. Raymonds Settle in Cambridge |
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A New Path Life can turn on a dime, it’s said, the course of history altered dramatically by a single event, for a civilization, a nation, a family: a gold strike in California, a sleek new ship sunk by an iceberg, a colleague’s heart failure. As Col. Robert R. Raymond approached the end of his thirty-year Army career in 1919, he considered retiring with his family to Asheville, North Carolina. A West Point classmate had settled there and raved about it, but the fellow officer died unexpectedly of a heart attack and Robert was left to ponder another choice. At the time, a large house was listed for sale in upstate New York near some of Blossom’s cousins, at no more than a few thousand dollars. The two-story white clapboard Colonial with black shutters and a slate roof was located in the village of Cambridge, an hour north of Albany. It would surely be affordable on the pension of a retired senior Army officer. The house at 120 West Main Street was previously occupied by one of Blossom’s aunts, had sat vacant for several years, yet was still in the estate of the late John Larmon. The colonel made a bid on it. In early 1920, most of the family took the train from Cleveland to Albany and on to Cambridge. Robert stayed behind to complete his final duty assignment through late spring in the company of son Dick who would finish his school year. For several months, Mrs. Raymond and the others lodged in a rental apartment at the corner of Main and Park, waiting for the new house to be available with the warming weather. A new path lay ahead for the Raymonds in upstate New York, unanticipated and unimagined. One may speculate on a hypothetical family of North Carolinians, one of largely Yankee culture with a touch of Dixie: Blossom was born in Chattanooga just over the Smokies from Asheville. First and foremost, though, they were steeped in American military tradition with roots traced directly to early English colonial days and to the later Revolutionary War: Robert’s forebear, Nathaniel Raymond, fought with the Connecticut Militia at the Battle of Brooklyn Heights in August 1776. So, in the third decade of the 20th century, clan Raymond-King settled well above the Mason-Dixon Line, among the hills and hollows, fields and forests of Washington County, New York, among the colorful, yet often stoic residents of Grandmas Moses’ quintessentially rural America.
120 West Main Street, Cambridge, NY: 1920-1972 In May 1920, Col. Raymond, U.S. Army (Retired), began a new life removed from all the years of uniforms and salutes, of barracks, mess halls and post exchanges, of the bugler’s call, mail call. He’d be at home in Cambridge now, to adapt to civilian life and to integrate into his adopted community. 120 West Main Street would be the family homestead for decades to come, for Robert and Blossom and their sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandkids, through June of 1972. With his engineering skills and some inheritance monies, Robert designed a two-level addition to the back of the house, contracting out the carpentry, roofing, plumbing and electrical work. The project was completed by 1926. The first-floor extension behind the kitchen included a pantry, a laundry room and lavatory, a photography dark room and the colonel’s work shop, with a set of back stairs leading to the second floor. The upper addition was also reached by a new hallway leading from the original five bedrooms and two baths to two new quarters in the back, a guest bedroom and a sewing room, which eventually served as a dorm for visiting grandkids. A flight of steps under the back stairwell led down to the basement and opened to several store rooms. Robert set up a firing range in the forward space for pistol practice during bad weather. Oil tanks at the back of the basement warmed the house in winter through a system of steam pipes reaching radiators in all the rooms. Also, a coal bin in the basement was stocked by delivery trucks via a chute. A bucket of coal would be lugged up to the kitchen in the morning to fire up the old cast iron stove, as Blossom made glowing coals for hot coffee and tea and the day’s meals. (An electric range wouldn’t appear until years later.) The photo shows the completed backside addition about 1928.
The Roaring Twenties The nation had entered a post-war economic boom as the modern industrial revolution swept the land and made its way into the Owlkill Valley. Family cars and farm trucks, what we call vintage today, rumbled along Main Street’s yellow bricks. An American LaFrance appeared in Cambridge at the CFD fire house and young Charley Raymond became a fire buff for life. After years of staff car assignments from Army motor pools, Col. Raymond purchased his own private auto, housed out of the weather in the detached garage. 120 was assigned telephone number 78 to connect around town via live operators at the local switching office, in those days across from the present-day Post Office. (Later, #78 became 3378, then 677-3378, then 1-518-677-3378. Then everybody got a cell phone!) Robert acquired a new vacuum tube amplified AM radio to catch the local news and concerts and operas from New York City. He unpacked a new Bendix washing machine. He’d left his Army tools behind, range finders, shell trajectory calculators, etc., so felt the need to keep his technical skills honed: he alone would be the operator! After all, this was an electro-mechanical box with sockets, switches and relays, wheels, belts, gears and lubrication points, and cold and hot water plumbing, that perhaps only a regimented ex-military man could fully appreciate. As a civilian, Robert’s first president in the early 1920s was Warren G. Harding (R), who surely received the new retiree’s thumbs up for supporting America’s rejection of the League of Nations, seen as giving away our national sovereignty. The proposed pact would permit any member nation to compel any other member into war in defense of the others. But the Constitution allows only the Senate to declare war on our behalf, echoing the words of George Washington in his farewell address, to paraphrase, “We thank France for assistance in our Independence, yet we must take great caution regarding permanent alliances.” Harding is further remembered, though, for corruption involving western energy production, an oil dome scandal. He does claim a U.S. presidential premier, the first to visit Alaska, but this cost him his life, barely two years into office. After his return he expired from the chilled northern air and travel fatigue. His VP was Calvin Coolidge, immediately sworn into office and reelected in 1924. As Wall Street rallied onward and upward, Herbert Hoover, by trade a mining engineer, was elected to the White House in 1928, and was on watch when the stock market tumbled early in his term in October 1929. His political life didn’t survive the tailspin. Cultural images and icons born in the Roaring Twenties included passing fancies like flappers and mirrored balls over dance floors. And the speakeasies through which the Kennedy fortune was amassed, including the not unrelated gangland violence in Boston, New York, Chicago. This was splashed across the pages of the New York Times which appeared daily in the Raymonds’ reading library. Other institutions established in the Twenties were the pro sports leagues, the NFL and NHL, and the emergence of celebrities from the silver and silent screen of the day. The New York Yankees became legendary with frequent championships and sport’s first superstar, Babe Ruth.
Food for the Table The village of Cambridge had a population, as today, of about two thousand, with another several hundred scattered about on the farms of the towns of Cambridge, White Creek and Jackson, hardy folk who raised dairy cows and sheep, oats and hay, corn, squash and pumpkins for the local market. Cousins of Blossom King Raymond, Walt Perry out in Coila and Emory Clark down in White Creek raised sheep. Blossom’s kin Anna Mary Robertson lived and painted down in Eagle Bridge, which was the closest rail connection for passenger service in and out of the area. Col. Raymond quickly learned that Salem, Greenwich and Hoosick Falls were fifteen minutes away by car, with Bennington a 20-minute drive over the Vermont line. It took a bit longer to get down to the Tri-Cities of Albany-Schenectady-Troy, and up to the Fort Edward-Hudson Falls-Glens Falls corridor along the Hudson, so the local grocery stores in the village generally kept the pantries full. To make the food dollar stretch, gardens in the back lot were worked with sections tilled for assorted crops. For breakfast eggs and the Sunday pot, chickens were raised behind the garage. The yard and coop were off the slate walkway down to Rice Creek, a gentle brook that provided fun for the kids and grandkids, rock dams and water wheels in summer, slippin’ and slidin’ on the ice in winter. Across the stream lay a meadow of tall grass, a snowfield by mid-winter, where occasionally were seen from the upstairs windows in the bright January sun, the ruddy coat of a red fox or the flash of a pheasant in flight.
Village Life Robert and Blossom became involved in the life of the village with a variety of roles about town. Robert sat on the Cambridge School Board, its classrooms and offices down the street from 120. He served as a member of the Board of Directors of Mary McClellan Hospital, just up Hospital Hill, and was the treasurer there for 25 years. The facility, built in classic Edwardian style, opened its doors a year before the Raymonds arrived. While on the board, Robert devised the Good Samaritan Fund through which thankful patients and others could donate to the fiscal well-being of the hospital. Patrons were remembered with marble plaques in the front lobby bearing their names in gold lettering. Unfortunately for the village, the hospital closed its doors at the turn of the 21st century, a time of uncertainty in the health care industry with escalating costs, not to mention today’s expectations by the general population for increased longevity. Hope lingers, though, that new life will spring from the 100-year-old campus. Col. and Mrs. Raymond had entered their retirement years confident in their lives’ accomplishments, modestly at peace with themselves and with their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. They became faithful communicants at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church where he served on the vestry for years, including as Senior Warden. He was a delegate to the Albany Diocese and to national conventions. Blossom was a long-time Sunday school teacher and a member of Saint Martha’s Altar Guild at St. Luke’s, and was a delegate to Episcopal Church Women. Caroline also served on the Alter Guild, and all family members sang in the church choir through the decades. Clara lived in Cambridge on and off over the years and was also active in these roles. Several Raymond weddings, multiple baptisms, and a handful of requiem services were performed in the church through the years, and today the family is remembered on plaques on the interior sanctuary walls. Robert and Blossom were well pleased in the fine accomplishments of their two youngest children at Cambridge Union High School. Charles was the salutatorian in 1926, and Virginia the valedictorian in 1929. “Charley” was a scholar-athlete who played on the dominant 1925 Championship CHS football team that went undefeated, 9-0, and outscored its Northeast New York State opponents 347-14! Along the way the Indians beat the local village rivals but also the larger schools from Hudson Falls, Saratoga Springs, Troy, Glens Falls and Albany.
USMA Cadet Sons: 1919 and 1931 Colonel Raymond found further satisfaction in two of his sons who followed him through the ranks of the Long Gray Line at West Point and who also continued through years of active service in the Army. Robert Jr. entered the Military Academy in the summer of 1917. With the nation’s entry into WWI in early 1917, his class of 1921 was accelerated two years and scheduled for graduation in June 1919. But as the World War drew to a close on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, Robert pinned on his second lieutenant bars that day to launch a career in the U.S. field artillery. After graduating from Cambridge Union in June 1926, and another year of home study, Charles entered the USMA in July 1927, joining and graduating with the Class of 1931. In 1936, he met an Army nurse, Anita Cervi of Denver, and they were soon married. Both Robert Jr. and Charles served in WWII, each moving up the ranks and retiring as Full Colonel. In the photo, ca. 1930, Charles, the cadet, and Robert flank their parents, off the side porch of 120 West Main Street.
The Growing Family: 1918-1950 In 1920 the house at 120 West Main Street was the residence for five of the seven children, since young adults Katherine and Robert Jr. had already set out on their own. At home were Caroline (age 24), Clara (19), Dick (17), Charley (11) and Virginia, Ginny (8). In time, all except Caroline would also leave, marry, and, with sister Katherine, bring home a good number of grandchildren to meet the proud grandparents. Eighteen first cousins would span a generation, from 1918 to 1950, and by the early post-war years, first cousins-once-removed and second cousins began to appear in Cambridge on holidays and vacation visits. Clearly attractive to any number of suitors, in particular from the ranks of the officers’ corps, Caroline nevertheless chose to remain single and live at home with her parents. She soon became employed at Mary McClellan Hospital, spending a career there as Medical Records Librarian. While the Raymonds were still in Hawaii in 1917, Katherine met Major Cris Burlingame, Coast Artillery Corps, of Elmira, NY. They were married the next year and the newlyweds remained in Honolulu when the rest of the family moved stateside in 1919. Major Burlingame also soon received orders for the mainland, first to Camp Custer, Michigan, near Battle Creek, and then on to Camp Eustis, Virginia. But as the Army was drawing down after the Armistice of 1918, he’d retire by 1922, after but ten years of service. Robert’s and Blossom’s first grandchildren were born these years, the Burlingame brothers, John Hancock in 1918 at Battle Creek and Alfred Wise in 1920 at Camp Eustis; then Edwin Clark in 1922 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Robert Raymond in 1924 at Mary McClellan Hospital in Cambridge. (As U.S. veterans, you’ll find their names on the WWII monument at Memorial Park.) In the early 1920s, Clara met Dr. Paul Spangler in New York City where she was an RN at Saint Luke’s Hospital. They wed in June 1924 at St. Luke’s Church in Cambridge. Dr. Spangler soon began practicing privately in Portland, OR, where the three Spangler granddaughters were born: Barbara Katherine in 1926, Elizabeth (Betty) Van Ness in 1927, and Margaret (Margo) Norton in 1929. They’d visit their grandparents in Cambridge on occasion beginning in the 1930s. Richard left 120 West Main by mid-decade to study and graduate in 1927 from Saint Stephens College on the lower Hudson River, with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Only a medical condition, a mild heart murmur, kept him out of West Point to the disappointment of the family. Dick then ventured west to Oregon with his brother-in-law, Paul Spangler, seeking employment. There he met Anne Carsten of Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia River from Portland. They were married in September 1929, and enjoyed outdoor activities including hiking through the picturesque Cascades. He proposed to her at the top of Mount Hood at 11,250 feet! They’d soon start a family of their own. The stock market crash of October 1929 was another event of singular and exacting consequences for the nation, indeed the world, with no small angst for some of the Raymonds in the years ahead.
Next Time - Chapter 6: 1930-1939, the Raymonds are Active in Village Life
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