W2

HISTORY OF THE ORPHAN BRIGADE.

was as brave as the bravest and yet gentle and refined as a woman, and almost as lovable. I never heard him speak a word that his mother might not have listened to, nor do I believe there was a man in the regiment who was not devotedly attached to him. I never knew him to fail in any emergency."

This is high praise, when we consider how potent are the influences of camp life and a long-continued state of war to lower moral standards and dull the finer sensibilities.

Holding sacred the memory of those who fell in the unequal struggle, and feeling still a comrade's interest in those who survive, he was active in helping to organize the Confederate Association of his county and to promote the plan to erect a suitable and enduring monument to Daveiss's Confederate dead.

HON. JOHN WILL DYER

Was born on a farm at Gum Grove, Union County, Ky., May 15, 1840. Here he was reared to manhood, obtaining his education in the meanwhile in the neighborhood schools, his attendance alternating with his work on the farm   " the work," he once humorously remarked, "alternating the oftenest."

His parents were John and Lauren (Mason) Dyer. His paternal grandfather, William Dyer, came from near Jamestown, Ya., in 1803, and settled in Union (then Henderson) County, within a mile of the present town of Morganfield. Soon afterward John Mason, his maternal grandfather, from the same county in Virginia, removed from Bourbon County, Ky., where he had first located for a year or two, and settled within a mile of William Dyer. Here the two families of children were brought up as neighbors and two intermarriages resulted. Dyer and Mason were the sons of Revolutionary soldiers, and the Masons were related to the Lauren family of South Carolina, also of Revolutionary fame, and from them the mother of John Will had the unusual feminine name Lauren.

The subject of this sketch, true to his ancestral blood, could not remain a mere spectator when war was in the land, and family traditions inclined him naturally to ally himself with the Southern cause. When the State had assumed her ostensible non-combatant attitude and men began to take independent action, he was among the first to enlist with Capt. Barnett, of Union County, for cavalry service in the Confederate Army. His company (F, of the original organization) was one of three companies enlisted for three years or the war. After the regiment was reorganized in 1862, he was made fourth sergeant of Co. G.   He shared a soldier's fortunes from that time to the close