President, American Cynamid Company
Centurion, 1919–1922
Born 8 December 1860 in Centralia, Illinois
Died 9 October 1922 in Rye, New York
Buried Greenwood Union Cemetery
, Rye, New York
Proposed by Jacob G. Schurman and Rudolph Hering
Elected 7 June 1919 at age fifty-eight
Century Memorial
Frank Sherman Washburn was a pioneer in that exceedingly interesting chemical and engineering achievement of these later days, the extraction of nitrogen from the air for use in fertilizers. The Germans were driven by force of necessity to this recourse, but the United States would far have outstripped them, as it outstripped belligerent Europe in most tasks of emergency production, had the war lasted another year or two. Mr. Washburn had been placed in charge of the government’s great nitrates plant at Muscle Shoals; he had previously developed the same field of production at Niagara Falls and had done important service on the reservoirs for New York’s water supply and on mining and water-power undertakings elsewhere.
Alexander Dana Noyes
1923 Century Association Yearbook
