Joseph Raphael De Lamar

Joseph Raphael De Lamar (September 2, 1843 – December 1, 1918) was a mine owner and operator in the western United States and Canada, as well as a financier and speculator, from the late 1870s until his death in 1918.

[1] In search of adventure, De Lamar stowed away aboard a Dutch vessel heading to the West Indies.

He was attracted to underwater work, including salvage which was profitable owing to the American Civil War, so he abandoned the merchant service and became a contractor.

In 1872 he raised the Charlotte, a transatlantic steamship that had foundered off the Bermudas loaded with Italian marble, and which had baffled the attempts of three previous wrecking companies.

He nearly died at Martha's Vineyard, going down in a diving suit to examine personally the damage to the Steamer William Tibbitts, in which he was imprisoned for thirty-six hours.

In 1878 De Lamar came to New York, and when mining fever struck Leadville, Colorado, he went west and bought several claims.

[2] The conventional stamp mill in which the ore was crushed and the gold amalgamated with mercury was almost useless in refining Cripple Creek ore. At first, the process didn't work well, but it was improved by John Rothwell, a consultant who was the foremost expert on chlorination at the time.

[3] During 1896–97, De Lamar acquired claims within the gold district of Mercur and had built a 500-ton cyanide process mill, later expanded to 1,000 ton, which was said to be the largest of the time, to work the mines.

During his Cripple Creek and Mercur operations years, he also invested in gold mines in Lincoln County, Nevada, that from 1896 to 1902 paid him $8,000,000 in profits.

At the Delamar Mine, Nevada, the barrel-chlorinating process was installed in 1895 and soon later discarded in favour of fine grinding and cyaniding.

While at Mercur, De Lamar became interested in the Bingham Canyon copper mines and sent Jackling and others to inspect the deposit.

In 1905 he and his International Nickel partners bought into the Nipissing Mine, located in Cobalt, Ontario, 300 miles north of Toronto.

As Inco, Dome and his other operations reached peak production during the high mineral market prices of World War I, he was one of the wealthiest men in America at the time of his death in 1918.

De Lamar was one of the most noted traders in Wall Street for over twenty years, and one of the leading financiers in the country.

He was also a lover of music, but his greatest delight was in the gathering of rare plants and flowers, of which he possessed a notable collection.

In 1914 he built an eighty-room manor house, "Pembroke", on Long Island in the town of Glen Cove; author Rex Beach filmed his 1910s movie Too Fat to Fly on its grounds.

Woman in a Pergola with Wisteria was originally the dramatic backdrop for an Aeolian organ console above the entrance to his palatial country home on Long Island's Gold Coast.