Carpenter, Edmund Nelson, 1865-1952

Edmund Nelson Carpenter was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on June 27, 1865, the son of Benjamin G. Carpenter and Sally Fell Carpenter. He joined B.G. Carpenter & Company, the family metal-working firm founded by his father, as a clerk, and became a junior partner after the death of his father in 1889. Carpenter served in a volunteer regiment during the Spanish-American War but only got as far as a training camp in Georgia. While retaining his interest in the Wilkes-Barre firm, Carpenter spent the next twenty years as an itinerant prospector and mining engineer, relying on contacts with mining capitalists like Samuel Newhouse, John L. Kemmerer and S. D. Warriner who had ties to the Wilkes-Barre area. From 1909 to 1918, he acted as special representative of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., both in England and at their nitrate mines in Chile, a post secured through the influence of his nephew R. R. M. Carpenter, Sr. He represented the Wyoming Valley in Congress in 1925-27. He died on November 4, 1852 in Philadelphia.