Amos J. Dye was born April 2, 1847, in Marietta, Ohio. He was the son of Amos J. Dye, Sr., and Maria Taylor. In 1860, the Dyes owned a large and valuable tobacco farm.
On 18 January 1864, at the age of eighteen, Amos enlisted in
the Union army and was assigned to Company H, 77th Ohio Volunteer
Infantry. Just a few weeks thereafter,
he married Marinda Jane McCowan on February 11, 1864.
On January 1, 1865, he transferred to Company D, 77th Ohio
Volunteer Infantry. He was discharged
March 8, 1866 in Brownsville, Texas, with the rank of private. Possibly his unit went there after the Civil
War as part of the Reconstruction effort.
Amos Dye and Marinda had a son, Herbert, in 1867, and a
daughter, Ida, in 1868. He was admitted
to the Ohio bar as a lawyer in 1877. By
1880, the Dyes were living in Huntington, West Virginia, where Amos was
practicing law.
Marinda died of stomach cancer in May, 1894, in Cincinnati,
Ohio, where she had been active in a fraternal society called the Knights and
Ladies of Honor. Amos Dye himself was by
then a Mason, and a Republican state legislator. Soon, he became an attorney for the Ohio
State Dairy and Food Department.
Dye married Ida Selma Schaetzle, a divorcee, on December 12,
1895. A son named Amos was born in 1897
and a daughter, Selma, in 1901. Another
son, Stelman, seems to have died in infancy.
In 1896, Amos Dye was accused of accepting a $5000 bribe
from a representative of the Paskola Company on condition that the state would
not prosecute a case against the company.
Dye vigorously denied taking a bribe and countersued. Apparently he did not lose his state position
since he continued to handle cases.
Tiring of Ohio winters, Dye purchased the Rumney house on Grand Avenue in 1902 and thereafter, the Dyes spent their winters in Phoenix. The Dye family was living a mile and a half north of Grand Avenue when Amos died on December 30, 1905, of cardiac insufficiency. He was buried in the Masons Cemetery, Block 17, Lot 3, Grave 3.
Dye’s widow Ida was left to raise their two surviving children alone. She filed for a widow’s pension on February 17, 1906, but her application was rejected on the grounds that Dye’s cause of death was not the result of his military service. She did not remain alone for long, though. Sometime in 1908, she married Peter William De Jong. Ida lived until 1954.
-by Donna Carr
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