Rimington, Col. J.W. (1832-1909 )

Col. John Wilson Rimington was born at Broomhead Hall, near Sheffield, England on May 18, 1832, the son of Sarah Ward and James Rimington. He earned his M.A. at Cambridge University, and spent some years in the military before marrying Sophia Anne Adelaide Abercrombie in 1864 and settling down to a privileged life at Lynton House, Upper Norwood, near Croydon in Surrey, England. He was a dedicated mineral collector, and also collected plants, shells and insects. His sources included Bryce Wright and August Krantz, according to labels in his collection.

Rimington died July 4, 1909, and the process of breaking up his collections and disposing of them began. The Rimington Collection must have been huge and very fine, perhaps one of the great "lost" British collections. Stevens Auction House sold part of it (492 lots) in June 1891, and there were two sales in Paris in 1912. One of the latter catalogs listed 1300 lots.

Some of the Rimington mineral collection was donated to the Accrington Museum ca. 1900 (possibly around 10,000 specimens!) along with his herbarium. The Accrington collections, in turn, were dispersed (a polite term for "destroyed, discarded, sold or given away") in 1951. Most of the minerals went to Reading University (13 cabinets full!). The fossils were dumped at Baxenden near Accrington. Some minerals might have gone to the Towneley Hall Museum in Burnley. The British mineral dealer James Gregory obtained several of the meteorites. John Calvert claimed to have purchased specimens too. The Sheffield Museum also bought some, and there are also specimens in the Lapworth Collection at Birmingham University and in the Ruskin Museum in Sheffield.