James C. Mackenzie

The long dinner-table at the Century grew familiar in recent years with the ingratiating and scholarly personality of James Cameron Mackenzie, whose quiet but ready conversation and quickly-aroused interest in the views of others brought him intimately into that friendly circle. Dr. Mackenzie’s career as educator had some characteristics of its own. Possibly no one in our time has applied so successfully in an American fitting-school the traditions of Harrow and Rugby. At the Lawrenceville school, which he virtually founded at the age of twenty-nine and over which he presided for seventeen years, Mackenzie himself was the English head-master at his best, transplanted into America. Perhaps his Scotch birth may have inclined him to those traditions, though he was brought to this country in his infancy and graduated at Lafayette, with what was said to have been the highest average mark for scholarship ever attained by an American college student. Not many of the hundreds of Lawrenceville graduates will have forgotten that tall and distinguished figure, with the collegiate gown and cap, leading the way across the little campus to the chapel.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1932 Century Association Yearbook