Rossiter W. Raymond

In the front rank of American mining engineers, Rossiter Worthington Raymond was best known to his friends and associates—who included particularly the whole Plymouth Church community of old-time Brooklyn—as a good friend, a kind and inspiring teacher, and a man as unfailing in practical wisdom as he was simple in character and conversation. Dr. Raymond, returning from his Heidelberg and Munich studies in 1861, immediately entered the army, where he served as aide-de-camp on Frémont’s staff in the Virginia campaign, receiving official commendation for gallant conduct. Leaving the service with the rank of captain, he resumed at once his favorite study of mining and metallurgical problems, in which he soon rose to eminence. Editor of the Engineering and Mining Journal in 1868, United States Commissioner of Mining Statistics in the same year, lecturer on geological questions at Lafayette College in 1870, Commissioner to the Vienna World’s Fair in 1873, and New York State Commissioner on electric subways in 1885, his professional achievements seem to belong to another generation. But Raymond was unmistakably of whatever generation he was living in, and his strong appreciation of humor and fund of anecdote always played even more readily about the things of the present than of the past. Honors were showered on him during half a century for his high professional achievements; from the doctor’s degree at Lafayette College in 1868 to his decoration in 1911 by the Mikado as Chevalier of the Order of the Rising Sun, for “eminent services to the mining industry of Japan.”

Alexander Dana Noyes
1919 Century Association Yearbook