Dymond, John

Submitted by Mike Miller

Dymond, John, editor and planter, was born May 3, 1836, of English parents, who came into Canada as immigrants from Cornwall. His father, Richard Dymond, was a miller and ran a flouring mill on Lord Granville's estate in Cornwall. His mother was Ann Hawkens, one of several children of the Hawkens family, a sister having preceded her to Canada and a brother coming later to Ohio. John Dymond, one of 3 surviving children, was reared in Zanesville, O., having been brought there as a small child with his 2 brothers, one older and one younger. The older brother, Richard Dymond, became a prominent merchant in Cincinnati, and died in 1911 in his 80th year. The younger brother, William Dymond, became an Episcopalian minister, a protege of Rev. Stephen H Tyng, Jr., and was the rector of a church near Fourth avenue and 84th street, New York, and he died in New York in 1870. The father of the family, Richard Dymond, became a Methodist preacher and was for years a merchant of Zanesville, O. He died in Cincinnati April 8, 1888, in his 81st year and was buried in Zanesville. John Dymond, the subject of this sketch, was educated in the public schools of Zanesville, completing his course in 1854, at the Zanesville academy, which was a noted school in those days. Later he graduated from Bartlett's college, Cinncinnati. As a boy he was an earnest student and stood high in all his classes. He served as a clerk in his father's mercantile business for several years, and in 1858 engaged in cotton manufacturing under the firm name of White & Dymond. In the spring of 1860 he went to New York, laden with excellent letters of introduction, and at once secured a position as traveling salesman, selling goods for his firm in a territory with which he was familiar--Western Pennsylvania and Virginia, throughout Ohio and Indiana, and in Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Louisville. Successful in this venture in New York, Mr. Dymond engaged in business on his own account in 1863 under the firm name of Dymond & Lally, Mr. Lally being a nephew of Francis Skiddy, a noted Wall street sugar and coffee broker of those days. New Orleans came into the possession of the Federal government April 15 1869 and some attempt was at once made to revive the sugar industry. This revival was slow and yet the wholesale grocers of the West were asking for New Orleans sugar. This led, in 1866, Mr. Dymond, then in Cuba, where he had gone for his health, broken down by hard work, to go to New Orleans with the view of starting a branch house there. This was done under the same firm name as in New York, and for some years a tremendous business was done by the firm in Louisiana sugar and molasses and in importing sugars and coffee. The plantation sugar business had its attractions as in ante-bellum days, with the result that the firm of Dymond & Lally bought in the Belair and Fairview plantations on the lower coast when they were offered for sale, the result of mortgage debts of ante-bellum claims. This was in Oct. and Nov., 1868, and then Mr. Dymond's career as an active sugar planter began. With increased attention to the planting business which then, as now, demanded intense studying and untiring effort, Mr. Dymond gradually withdrew from active business in New Orleans. In 1870 the firm name was changed to Dymond & Edwards, and this continued until 1875, the firm doing a large business in New York and New Orleans in coffee and sugars. In 1875 the firm became Dymond & Gardes, continuing the same business, and in 1877 the New York business was discontinued. All this while the planting business was demanding increasing attention. Mr. Dymond secured the signature of Duncan F. Kenner, John Burnside, S. H. Kennedy, Thomas D. Miller and several other prominent sugar planters, calling the planters to effect an organization. This was done in the autumn of 1877. That organization, the Louisiana Sugar Planters' association, revolutionized industry of Louisiana and, in fact, of the entire cane the sugar sugar world. Mr. Dymond builded better than he knew when the association was launched. In 1880 the firm of Dymond & Gardes was dissolved and Mr. Dymond discontinued his active city business and finally devoted himself entirely to his planting interests. Of a mechanical turn of mind, he was quick to grasp new ideas in labor-saving devices and to aid in their development. Conspicuous among these were the Mallon stubble digger and other machines, the use of the McDonald hydraulics and of double and triple milling. He patented a sulphur machine now in use everywhere in the cane sugar world, the shelf or cascade machine. He was the first to weigh sugar cane and to purchase sugar by weight in Louisiana. The redivivus of multiple effect evaporation was promoted by him. The so-called dry-vacuum in vacuum boiling was introduced on the sugar plantations by him. The experiments in diffusion were encouraged by him and he and Hon. Henry McCall were placed in charge of the experiments making at Gov. Warmoth's Magnolia plantation by Norman J. Colman, then commissioner of agriculture of the United States. When the Louisiana association was organized in 1877, Mr. Dymond Sugar Planters refused to accept the presidency, preferring Mr. Kenner as the more influential man and capable of doing more good for the cause. When Mr. Kenner died in 1887, Mr. Dymond was made president and served until March, 1896, when he refused to continue, believing, as he did, that some other man would under all the circumstances be the better man for the position, and he aided in securing Judge Emile Rost to accept the presidency. The Louisiana Sugar Planters association agitated for some time better methods of selling sugars, and in 1884 the Louisiana Sugar exchange was organized and it has been in active operation ever since. Hon. Edward J. Gay was made its first president, and Mr. Dymond and William Agar vice-presidents. In 1885, the year of our Cotton Centennial exposition, Dr. William Carter Stubbs, then state chemist of Alabama, and professor of agriculture in the university of that state, visited New Orleans and the exposition. On the suggestion of Mr. D. D. Colcock, secretary of the Louisiana Sugar exchange, and with the approval of Mr. Kenner, the president, Mr. Dymond invited Dr. Stubbs to again visit New Orleans and to deliver an address to the Louisiana Sugar Planters' association, in which he would urge upon the sugar planters of Louisiana the expediency of research work in the agriculture and manufacture of sugar. Dr. Stubbs accepted the invitation, and in due course the present sugar experiment station, now at Audubon Park, was created, its corporate name being the Louisiana Scientific Agricultural association, and Mr. Dymond was made its first president and is such now, the work of the station, however, having passed under state control in conjunction with Federal control. Mr. Dymond secured subscriptions to the extent of $60,000 to guarantee and to pay for the expenses of the association during the first 5 years of its existence. The Louisiana Sugar Planters' association as an industrial student body in scientific research work and utilizing the best talent in the country, developed the need of a technical journal devoted to the sugar industry. A meeting was held at the St. Charles hotel, in 1888, into which many of the sugar planters were called. The scheme was launched under the title of "The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer Co,,'' to carry on the publication, and Mr. Dymond was chosen editor and elected general manager and president of the corporation. He devoted himself to the work earnestly for many years without money compensation, the motive of the organization being not to make a profit, but to save the sugar industry from many preventable losses. This was done and the new venture marked an epoch in the history of the Louisiana sugar industry. The Louisiana Planter now circulates throughout the entire world wherever sugar is made from cane or beet. The burning of Mr. Dymond's Belair sugar house in 1907 with scarcely any insurance on it, and a loss of over $100,000 resulting, put him out of the manufacturing side of the sugar industry. He sold 2 of his large plantations, Mousecour and Fairview, retaining Belair and Fanny plantations, whereon he persists in his favorite cane culture, but is gradually taking up other industries. In New Orleans, where he resides much of the time, he devoted himself to his editorial and printing house work, which has assumed considerable proportions. While Mr. Dymond came to Louisiana in 1866 and established a branch business house here under the same style of his New York house of Dymond & Lally, he retained his citizenship in New York, where in a mild way he was one of the Democratic regulars. In 1877 he removed entirely to New Orleans, domciling himself at Belair in the parish of Plaquemines, where his large plantation business lay, and still maintaining his city business and a city residence. This led him into active political life, more particularly in connection with the sugar industry, which seemed to be continually under fire in the halls of Congress. He co-operated with the Hon. Duncan F. Kenner while the latter was president of the Louisiana Sugar-Planters' association. Through the co-ooperation of United States Marshal Pitkin of Louisiana and of, Senator William Pitt Kellogg in Washington Mr. Dymond secured the appointment of Mr. Kenner as a member of the famous tariff commission of 1882, whose tariff bill was finally adopted March 1, 1883. Mr. Kenner 's Louisiana friends recognized his peculiar fitness for the position and Pres. Arthur made the appointment. With the death of Mr. Kenner in 1887 Mr. Dymond became the political leader of the sugar planters for some years. He was elected a delegate to the national Democratic convention in St. Louis in 1888, when Grover Cleveland was nominated the second time. Mr. Dymond was a member of the platform committee and made a hard fight to hold down ultra free frade ideas, Mr. Dymond being a protectionist Democrat. The continued attacks on the sugar industry every year in Washington finally led to the enactment of the Wilson bill of 1894, which became a law Aug. 28. That led to the meeting of the sugar planters at the Hotel Royal Sept., 1894, when the Lily White movement was inaugurated, the sugar planters voting to go into a White Republican party with no dissenting vote but that of Mr. Dymond, who claimed that he was an old-fashioned Democrat and could not change. Owing to some ill feeling then engendered, Mr. Dymond afterward refused reelection as president of the Sugar Planters' association, but always co-operated with it most earnestly. He remained president of the Louisiana Scientific Agricultural association (the experiment station corporation) and of the Louisiana State Agricultural society, later declining re-election to that position. In 1888, when Francis T. Nicholls was elected governor, Mr. Dymond was made president of the police jury in Plaquemines parish. In 1892 he was elected as state representative of Plaquemines parish, which had been under negro control since the Civil war, being then under the control of colored men and a black inan representing the parish in the legislature. Mr. Dymond undertook the rectification of all this and finally succeeded in establishing his own election and the colored man was dropped out. Plaquemines parish in 1896 still had a colored sheriff and a colored clerk of the court and Mr. Dymond determined to unload them. They had been maintained in position by skillful white men. Threats were made of armed opposition, or of the capture of ballot boxes, etc., hence an adequate supply of Winchester rifles was secured, tub boats for transports and more than 100 armed men were concentrated in Pointe a la Hache. The votes were counted decently and properly and Frank C. Meyers was found to be elected sheriff and Mr. Dymond as representative, and the white men of Plaquemines parish had come into their own for the first time in a generation. Mr. Dymond was elected by the votes of Plaquemines parish to represent them in the constitutional convention of 1898, and he was made chairman of the committee on agriculture. In the state Democratic convention in 1889 Mr. Dymond was nominated for governor of the state by the parishes of St. Bernard and Plaquemines. Mr. R. H. Snyder of Tensas was also nominated, but on the announcement of the candidacy of W. W. Heard of Union parish Messrs. Dymond and Snyder withdrew and W. W. Heard was unanimously chosen the candidate of the party. In 1900 Mr. Dymond was elected state senator from the Fourth district, comprised of Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes and the 8th and 9th wards of New Orleans, and was reelected in 1904. He failed of election in 1908, was again elected in 1912 and is now serving. In 1890 Mr. Dymond became seriously interested in the anti-lottery movement and was the business manager of the party's organ, the "New Delta." He carried his parish against the lottery and as president of its police jury declined the proffered gift of $3,000 of lottery money for the maintenance of the public levees during the high water season of 1891, and was active in the whole campaign that made Murphy J. Foster governor and our present chief justice of the United States supreme court, E. D. White, United States senator from Louisiana. Mr. Dymond was reared a Democrat of the old school and always adhered to the state rights doctrine and home rule for the white race. These qualifications included a strict construction of the national constitution and local control of the smallest political division of the state. He has been a member of the Unitarian church since boyhood. He became a Mason in 1857 and has attained to the degree of royal and select master in the York rite. He is a member of the Boston and Round Table clubs of New Orleans, was formerly a member of the New York chamber of commerce and of the New York Historical society, and is now and has been since its revival after the Civil war, a member of the Louisiana Historical society. In 1862 Mr. Dymond married Nancy Elizabeth Cassidy in Zanesville, O. She was the daughter of Hon. Asa R. Cassidy, a Virginian, and one of the early settlers in Ohio, a representative in the state legislature and for many years mayor of Zanesville. Mrs. Cassidy was Miss Nancy Senter of Boscawen, N. H. , who as a child worked by the side of her parents' emigrant wagon all the way from New Hampshire to Central Ohio. Mr. and Mrs. Dymond are the parents of 6 children, all born in New York City except the youngest, Richard. Frederick Dymond, a Tulane medical student, died in 1894. Three sons and 2 daughters are now living, viz: John, Jr. , William, Richard, Helen, now Mrs. Benedict, and Florence.

Source: Louisiana: Comprising Sketches of Parishes, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons, Arranged in Cyclopedic Form (volume 3), pp. 139-143. Edited by Alcee Fortier, Lit.D. Published in 1914, by Century Historical Association.