Byron Taylor Loomis

Born 183020, November 1831, 17 or abt in Mongomery County, New York, USA. He married February 17, 1853, in Allen County, Ohio and worked as retired farmer. He died July 13, 1907, at home in Humptulips, WA.

A Cavalryman's War

Byron Taylor Loomis was born around 1830–1834, likely in Montgomery County, New York, and was farming in Ohio when the Civil War broke out. On October 14, 1861, he enlisted as a private in Company B of the 1st Ohio Cavalry Regiment, serving alongside his brother-in-law Alexis Pope Hayes. During a hard winter scouting mission into Kentucky in December 1862, sent to recover government supplies seized by Confederate raiders, Byron developed severe hemorrhoids from the relentless riding and exposure — a condition that plagued him for the rest of his life and eventually cut his military service short. He was honorably discharged in October 1864 at the rank of corporal, having married Juliette Cordelia Hayes in February 1853 in Allen County, Ohio, before the war.

Storekeeper and Farmer on the Kansas Frontier

After the war, Byron farmed in Iowa and then, from 1874, in Ellsworth County, Kansas, where he became a respected local figure: a homestead farmer on Turkey Creek, a justice of the peace, an election judge paid by the day, and a prizewinning exhibitor at the county fair, winning ribbons for potatoes, squash, mules, and grain. He briefly ran a meat market and, in 1887, bought and sold several hardware and grocery stores in Ellsworth and Geneseo in quick succession — at one point boasting the largest hardware stock in western Kansas — before running the Junction House boarding house in Geneseo. His finances did not always keep pace with his ambitions: he was sued more than once over unpaid debts in the late 1880s, and in 1889 and 1890 several of his town lots in Geneseo were seized and sold at sheriff's auctions to satisfy bank mortgages.

Out to Washington

In 1890 Byron left Kansas for good, moving his family first to Olympia and then, in 1892, to the shore of Quinault Lake, Washington, where he ran cattle on a claim before eventually settling in Humptulips, in what was then Chehalis County. There he and Juliette ran a store that their son Bud later bought from a previous owner in exchange for thirty head of cattle, and Byron served as the town's elected justice of the peace and school director. His war-era ailments worsened steadily with age: by the 1890s he suffered from rheumatism so severe it ended his ability to do farm labor, and in December 1901 he woke one morning to find himself completely blind, regaining only a dim, partial glimmer of sight in one eye. Neighbors who supported his pension claims described him as a man of “moral character” whose war injuries had kept him from manual work for over a decade. Byron died at his home in Humptulips on July 13, 1907, having drawn a small Union veteran's pension for hemorrhoids, rheumatism, heart trouble, and blindness that he attributed throughout his life to his Civil War service.