Mrs. Lucy (Samuels) Dyer 1821-1898

SAMUELS, DYER

Posted By: cheryl Locher moonen (email)
Date: 2/7/2020 at 17:12:14

Daily Herald [newspaper] (Dubuque, Iowa), Feb. 29, 1898

Mrs. Lucy Samuels Dyer.

Mrs. Lucy W. Dyer died a few days ago at the residence of her son in Minneapolis, and was brought here and buried on Friday last. She was a resident of Dubuque for more than forty years, but since the year 1889 has resided at St. Paul and Minneapolis with her sons.

Her death calls up many recollections of the Dubuque of the old days before the war, and of people who were then prominent. Most of these have now passed to the great unknown; others have removed to other localities; and a few are still to be found at the homes and upon the streets here. In their day many of them were prominent people here, well known to every resident of the place, because a person is relatively better known in a small place than in a large one.
[see entry for John J. Dyer for this section of the article]

Mrs. Dyer survived her husband for over forty years. Like him, she too was a native of the Virginia valley, coming from the same vicinity that he did, some point in the section lying between Staunton and Winchester, away from the large towns. She was a Samuels, Lucy Samuels, the daughter of a well-to-do Virginia planter, who lived in the country upon his own broad acres in the old Virginia style, and with a retinue of slaves and poor whites almost as dependent as the negroes themselves. Here, surrounded by his friends, his dependents and his family, he dispensed a liberal hospitality and educated his children in the ideas and beliefs to which he was accustomed and of the soundness of which he never had a doubt. Mrs. Dyer always retained many of the beliefs and prejudices which she learned when a girl, and although adapting herself to new modes and changed conditions, yet her recollections of the Virginia valley and the home of her girlhood were accompanied by a sigh.

Judge Dyer built a large and pretentious house now occupied by the Sisters at the corner of Main and Thirteenth streets, with its tall columns and old Virginia style, the pillars being the same as are now seen at Mt. Vernon; and here he and his family dispensed the same liberal hospitality to which they were accustomed in the valley.

To this day it is one of the largest and most impressive residence buildings to be found in Dubuque, and it is liable to stand yet for many years a monument to the memory of those who built it. Before his death he had planned and began the erection of a large residence in the country beyond West Dubuque, to which his family removed and where they resided for many years after his death.

The death of Mrs. Dyer seems like tearing a leaf from the past, for it brings to mind vividly and strongly the Dubuque of ante-bellum days. The generations then were different from what they are now, and the men and women were others than are now seen on the streets. But in their day the newspapers were full of items about them; their names were seen where others are seen now, and their sayings and doings occupied the local attention as others do now. Mrs. Dyer was the sister of Ben. M. Samuels, one of the most distinguished citizens that ever resided here, a candidate for governor of the State of Iowa at one time, and an orator whose fame extended over the whole United States, and one of whose speeches, a fervid and passionate appeal to the Charleston convention of 1860, to which he was an accredited delegate from Iowa, was in favor of union and harmony. It was an eloquent and stirring speech, full of boldness, passion, harmony, an appeal from a southern-born man to southern men to stand by the Union and the old flag, a speech that is well remembered by many to this day, although nearly two score years have passed away since it was uttered, and the tongue that delivered it has been stilled in death during almost the same period. Mrs. Dyer was the wife of one prominent man and the sister of another, both eminent in their day, and although surviving both of her illustrious relatives by as many years as mark a generation of men, and herself experiencing her full share of the vicissitudes that are apt to overtake all in the journey through life, yet she filled out more than the allotted span of life, and never to her dying day forgot her duty to their memory and always approved herself worthy of the honored names she bore before and after marriage."