Drowned by the Explosion

The story on this stone is interesting. It is a big stone, and it had to be impressive in cost. Just a few details lead to more details. A Connecticut Yankee comes to Cleveland, becomes successful, and dies in the deep South months after the War for Union.

SAMUEL RAYMOND
BORN IN BETHLEHEM CONN. MARCH 19. 1805.
DROWNED BY THE EXPLOSION OF THE STEAMER CARTER
ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER FEB. 2. 1866.
MARY NORTH HIS WIFE
BORN IN NEW BRITAIN CONN. AUG. 11. 1811
DIED JULY 28. 1872.

A son, James, lived 40 days in 1839. Another, William, lived 8 months in '43- '44. They never saw Cleveland. Grave markers are memorial stones, not every stone has a body near it. These young Raymonds are not there, and neither is their father. The family came to the city in 1853. Where Samuel Raymond became a wholesale dry goods merchant in the Raymond Lowe Company. Another child, Mary Louise was born in 1848, and died 1872 in South Carolina.

On another face is listed, another son, Henry North Raymond *1835, 1911†. His wife, Elizabeth Adair *1835, 1911†; and Helen Adair *1862, 1923†.

A son, not listed, is Samuel A. Raymond *1845, 1915†. He was partners with his brother, Henry, in the family business, but left to work with the millionaire industrialist, Amasa Stone, whose family he married into, and after Stone's suicide ran his estate. They are both buried in upscale Lake View Cemetery.

Disasters often happen at the sleepiest hour. That hour is well after midnight, but still before dawn. In mid-winter, 2 February, 1866, 35 miles north of Vicksburg, Mississippi disaster came to the steam boat W. R. Carter. There were some 200 people on the boat. A boiler exploded. Shrapnel created splinter. The boom set the ship afire. The ship sank. People drowned, people died of exposure. Estimates of above 125 died in various torment.