Byron Taylor Loomis

1830s–1850s

Born about 1830–1834, probably in Montgomery County, New York, to Milo Loomis and Lucretia King. Married Juliette Cordelia Hayes in Allen County, Ohio, on 17 February 1853; daughters Sarah (1853) and Clara (1856) were born.

1860s

A farmer in Marion Township, Allen County, Ohio. Served in Company B, 1st Ohio Cavalry, from October 1861 to October 1864, and suffered for the rest of his life from an illness contracted on a winter scouting march. Moved to Vinton, Iowa, after the war; son Isaac (Ike) was born in 1866.

1870s

Farmed in Fairfax Township, Linn County, Iowa, and from 1874 in Ellsworth County, Kansas, where he homesteaded on Turkey Creek. Son Nelson (Bud) was born in 1873. Won prizes at the first Ellsworth County Fair in 1878.

1880s

Justice of the peace, election judge, and temperance organizer in Lincoln Township. In 1887 sold the farm and bought hardware and grocery stores in Ellsworth and Geneseo, then ran the Junction House boarding house. Spent 1889 in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and lost property to foreclosure.

1890s–1900s

Moved to Washington in 1890: Olympia, Quinault Lake, and from about 1900 Humptulips, where he ran a store and served as justice of the peace and school director. Went nearly blind in 1901. Widowed in 1904; died at home on 13 July 1907.

A Cavalryman's War

Byron Taylor Loomis was born around 1830 to 1834, probably in Montgomery County, New York, the son of Milo Loomis and Lucretia King. His mother had two more children, Mary Ann and Josiah Doan; he had a brother, A. P. Loomis. On February 17, 1853, in Allen County, Ohio, he married Juliette Cordelia Hayes, and by 1860 they were farming in Marion Township there, with land worth $1,600.

On October 14, 1861, Byron enlisted at Delphos as a private in Company B of the 1st Ohio Cavalry, along with his wife's brother Alexis Pope Hayes. His brother-in-law Russell Hayes said that when he joined up he was "a stout man, sound as a dollar"; the army recorded him as five foot eight, with gray eyes and dark hair. In December 1862, after Confederate raiders under Witcher seized government supplies on the Sandy River, his squadron rode hard for three days to Paintsville, Kentucky. The constant riding and exposure gave Byron a painful case of bleeding hemorrhoids; that first night he woke at midnight and broke the ice on the river to bathe before he could sleep. He was sent back to camp, and the condition troubled him for the rest of his life. His sergeant excused him from many scouting rides but kept him in the company as a "good soldier." He rose to corporal at some point, and he was discharged at Columbus on October 26, 1864, when his term of service expired.

Kansas

After the war the Loomises moved to Vinton, Iowa, where in 1868, with Byron laid up and the family ill, his half-sister Mary came to help, and by 1870 they were farming in Fairfax Township, Linn County, with property worth more than $6,000. Their children were Sarah (1853), Clara (1856), Isaac Hayes (Ike, 1866, Meghan's 2x-great-grandfather), and Nelson (Bud, 1873), and there was also a son, W. A. In 1874 Byron bought a farm in Ellsworth County, Kansas, and in 1877 he received a 160-acre homestead. By 1880 the family was farming on Turkey Creek in Lincoln Township, where the township built a bridge over the creek on his land in 1884.

Byron threw himself into local affairs. He was one of the county's managers for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, ran for probate judge as an independent in 1874, was elected justice of the peace in 1880, and served again and again as an election judge, juror, road viewer, and school board member. In August 1880 he hosted a temperance picnic in the grove on his farm, with a fife and drum band leading the crowd out from Ellsworth, and in January 1882 he sat on the coroner's jury after a mob took a confessed murderer from the county jail and hanged him from a telegraph pole. At the first Ellsworth County Fair in 1878 he won prizes for potatoes, beets, squashes, and the best pair of mules, and in 1882 for the best agricultural display, a brood mare, popcorn, rye, and wheat. In 1886 he began drawing a Union pension of $4 a month.

In April 1887 he sold the farm and went into business, buying a grocery and hardware store in Ellsworth and J. W. Dary's hardware store in Geneseo, where in June he was said to have the largest stock of hardware in western Kansas and his son Ike clerked behind the counter. By August he had traded or sold both hardware stocks. In the winter of 1888–89 he ran the Junction House, a boarding house in Geneseo, at a dollar a day. That spring he and his son-in-law John Knox went down to Guthrie, Oklahoma, where he ran a blacksmith and wagon shop for a few months. Meanwhile his debts caught up with him: the banks sued him in 1887, and in 1889 and 1890 his lots in North Geneseo were sold at sheriff's sales. In early 1890 he left Kansas for the Pacific coast.

Humptulips

In Washington Byron worked as a laborer in Olympia, carried the mail between Shelton and Union City, and in 1892 moved the family to a claim at Quinault Lake, where he ran cattle. By 1900 he and Juliette were living at Humptulips, in Chehalis County, where he ran a store that his son Bud had bought in 1898 from Fred Williams for thirty head of cattle. He was elected school director in 1902 and justice of the peace that November. In March 1902 a fire broke out in his kitchen roof and was put out by a bucket brigade.

His health was failing. "I contracted rheumatism during the war," he wrote, "but have managed to get along till about five years ago when I was stricken so bad while working on the farm that I had to quit all out door work." In December 1901, he said, "I waked up one morning and opened my Eyes and found that I was Stone Blind but after rubbing them a little my right eye came to so I could see a little but the left eye never has come to much." Neighbors swore that he was a man of "moral character" whose rheumatism and heart trouble had kept him from manual labor for a decade, and his pension rose to $12 a month. Juliette died in October 1904. Byron served on a jury as late as June 1907, and he died at home in Humptulips on July 13, 1907.