George Barber Raymond (1822-1870), a Massachusetts Congregationalist recently converted to the Baptist faith, is elected as a selectman (in effect, a member of the board of directors) of Winchendon (in Worcester County)*. He would serve in this post throughout the Civil War, until 1866.
Only well-respected men in New England towns attained such a position. Although raised on a farm in humble circumstances, Raymond eventually found success in the construction trade, and in time acquired a variety of business interests, becoming a man of means. During the war, he also served as town assessor (1863-1864) and on other town committees.
Of his Baptist faith, following Raymond’s death one writer said of the first-generation Baptist, “he has ever since been a consistent and influential worker of that denomination.”
While Raymond did not fight in the war, “he was active in the civil war in raising [Union] troops.”
Like George Barber Raymond, many locally prominent Baptists of the Civil War era are largely silent in the annuls of history, their stories important but lost or misplaced over time. Yet without the contributions to church and country of innumerable such individuals, the story of Baptists, and perhaps that of the American Civil War, may have been much different.
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* The exact date of George Barber Raymond’s election in 1861 as a selectman is unknown.
