Henry Coit Mortimer (1849-1912) was a charter member of The Lambs and served as a director on the Lambs Council from 1878-1882 and 1885-1886. It is unclear when he was elected, but it would have been between 1875-1878, when the Club was in its infancy after the 1877 incorporation. He later was president of the New York Life Insurance Company, and was an acquaintance of notable gentlemen, including 24th vice president of the United States Garret Hobart and U.S. congressman and co-founder of Macy’s, Isidor Straus.
A graduate of Columbia, Class of 1868, Mortimer was in the fire insurance business in the 1880s, along with fellow charter member, George Washington Walker. He was a member of Company D, Seventh Regiment, which drilled in the famous Park Avenue Armory and was made up of the most respected men of the era.
Like other Lambs, such as the tragic William Minns Tileston, he was a dog fancier, and attended the Madison Square Garden kennel shows, forerunner of the Westminster Kennel Club. He was a backer of incumbent Democratic President Grover Cleveland in 1888 and supported him at a mass rally at Cooper Union. In the Gilded Age, when the Times dutifully ran long lists of prominent residents and where they spent their summer vacations, Mortimer appeared along scores enjoying Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island.
In 1873 he married Katherine Crocker, and they had three children. The family spent time at their Massachusetts summer residence, where Henry C. Mortimer died in Barnstable on September 30, 1912, age 62.
–Researched and written by Shepherd Kevin C. Fitzpatrick (2026).