Published September 10, 2024
By Reg Ankrom
A photo of Asa Tyrer. (Photo courtesy of Family Search)
Chloe Andrews Tyrer would be no more specific with her children about the date of her wedding to their father, Asa Tyrer, than to say it was in 1810. To do so would have risked scandal in the Tyrer family. Son William L. Tyrer was born in September―in the ninth month after January 1810. The date of the oldest child’s birth and their parents’ silence about the date of their wedding raised suspicions among the children about why their parents married.
In the years that followed, Chloe Tyrer gave birth to two more boys and two daughters. In 1818 Asa asked her to join him on an adventure to western Illinois to locate land he bought there. Stephen B. Leonard, a friend of the Andrews family in Broome County, New York, and land speculator, sold Tyrer two adjoining quarter sections, 320 acres of land, for $300 in the Illinois Military Tract. Congress in May 1812 designated 3.5 million acres of federal land on the western side of the Illinois Territory as bounty land for veterans of the War of 1812.
Though her husband was eager to find his property, wife Chloe twice refused his pleas to accompany him. She would not leave “civilization for this howling wilderness with wild Indians for companions,” she told daughter Mahala Tyrer Shauce.
Asa Tyrer had no difficulty finding his land. Edmund Dana and his crew of federal mapmakers had just surveyed the region of the Military Tract that in 1825 would become Adams County. Illinois had gained statehood in 1818, and the General Assembly on January 13, 1825, granted New York émigré John Wood’s application to carve an 855-square-mile Adams County from Pike County
Tyrer’s property was situated in the eastern half of Section 12, about two miles southeast of the town, once named Bluffs and in 1825 renamed Quincy for the second President Adams. The Tyrer farm would be in Melrose Township when it was organized in 1849. Tyrer built a log cabin and established the first blacksmith shop in Adams County. For several years, Tyrer’s only competition was William Ross’s blacksmith shop in Atlas, then the county seat of Pike County. Forty miles away, it was no competition.
In 1895, South Park was established on 52 acres of the old Tyrer farm, then owned by Judge B.F. Berrian and his brothers. The park would ultimately take up 135 acres.
Tyrer also built the county’s first corn mill, which was powered by a spring on his land that fell about six feet from a rock crag. As the water plunged over the rock ledge, it was captured in a trough, which descended as the weight of the water filled it. When a granite pestle at the other end of the lanyard reached its apogee, the trough sprang open, the water gushed out, and the pestle fell in a crushing blow on the grains of corn on a stone mortar below. This first industrial machine in Adams County would repeat the action three times a minute and make several quarts of hominy daily.
Men cast their first votes in Adams County on July 5, 1825, at Willard Keyes’s log cabin, the county’s only polling place, at today’s Front and Vermont Streets. They elected Tyrer Adams County’s first coroner. That might have suggested Tyrer’s growing reputation. Or, it might have reflected the county’s scant population. All but two men of the county were either elected to offices or were selected to serve on petit and grand juries. Keyes’s cabin also served as the first county court house.
Assured that her husband could provide for the family’s subsistence, Chloe Tyrer in 1825 packed up her belongings and her now-six children to join her husband in Illinois. Asa and Chloe Tyrer had six more children in the next ten years.
The Tyrers settled into their pioneer life. Tyrer was re-elected coroner and served a term as a grand juryman. But wanderlust tugged at him again, this time calling him to Galena, where lead mining was booming. Federal mining permits, which numbered 419 in 1824, were 2,384 in 1827.
Tyrer and son William, 18, avoided federal regulations that required miners to live year-round on their claims. The Tyrers leased land and mined on a farm near Dodgeville, Wisconsin, 50 miles north of Galena—out of federal regulations’ reach. They worked their mine in summer and returned to Quincy the rest of the year. William settled permanently in Dodgeville after the Black Hawk War ended in 1832.
Tyrer moved his family to Dodgeville sometime in the 1840s. Asa and Chloe Tyrer were considered miracle workers by the people they treated when cholera visited Dodgeville in summer 1850. Several said the “steam treatment” the Tyrers used saved lives. In a memoir held by the Wisconsin State Historical Society, James Rogers of Dodgeville wrote: “My father and brother-in-law were attended by no regular physician but were waited on by ‘Old Man Tyer (sic) as he was called, who lived about a mile west of the present NW Depot. He had remarkable success with the cases he treated. He waited on my father and Mathew Rogers, and both recovered. His treatment was medicated steam inhaled through the nose.”
Chloe Tyrer wrote the concoction for her children. “To one quart of whiskey, drown10 to 12 live coals of fire in it, then strain it. Add three tablespoonfuls of saltpeter and three of sulphur.” A stricken person was covered with a wet sheet and the medicated steam was inhaled through the nose.
The Tyrers returned to Quincy and lived on South 12th, near Harrison Street. Asa Tyrer, 86, died there on August 6, 1873, and was buried in Woodland Cemetery. Chloe Tyrer continued to live in Quincy until 1882, when she returned to Dodgeville to live with her daughter, Mahala Tyrer Shaunce. She died on July 22, 1883. Her obituary in the Quincy Daily Herald indicated she had 47 grandchildren, “not more than half of the original number, many of them having died,” and at least 85 great grandchildren.
Reg Ankrom is a former director of the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County. He is a local historian, author of a prize-winning two-volume biography of U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, and a frequent speaker on Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and antebellum America.
Sources:
Ankrom, Reg, “Ross Brothers settle in Western Illinois, founding Pike County,” Quincy
Herald-Whig, December 8, 2019.
“Chloe Andrews Tyrer,” https:///www.findagrave.com/memorial/6996655/chloe_tyrer
Dodgeville Chronicle, September 12, 1884.
Henry, Gary. ’Galena, Illinois, During the Lead Mine Era.” (master’s thesis, Eastern Illinois
University, 1976)
Iowa County, Wisconsin, Genealogy Trails History Group,
https://genealogytrails.com/wis/iowa/biosT.html
“Mahala Tyrer Shauce,” https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9434571/mahala_shaunce
Oakley, Hal. “Sauk village becomes Quincy,” Quincy Herald-Whig, July 15, 2012.
Quincy Daily Herald, August 18, 1833.
“William L. Tyrer,” Iowa County, Wisconsin, Genealogy Trails History Group,
https://genealogytrails.com/wis/iowa/biosT.httml
Wilcox, David F. Quincy and Adams County History and Representative Men, Vol 1. (Chicago:
The Lewis Publishing Co., 1919), 32-33, 100-102, 128.
