LYON, Orlo Henry

LYON, CHILDS, SKINNER, BRADFORD, MATHEWS, MCLEON

Posted By: Chantel Schmitt (email)
Date: 5/6/2012 at 14:28:33

Orlo Henry Lyon (1835-1904)

Orlo H. Lyon, who came to Rockford with Mr. Childs in 1857, was born also in Woodstock, Connecticut, of Asa and Sarah Ann Skinner Lyon on January 20, 1835. Graduating from Woodstock Academy, he taught in the late 1840s and entered a dry goods firm in Thompson, Connecticut, until 1856. He arrived at Cedar Falls that year and Rockford in 1857, where he taught school until the opening of the Civil War. He enlisted in the Iowa Third Battery Light Artillery as a commissioned Lieutenant.

On April 23, 1867 he married Belle A. Bradford and by her he had seven children - Anna S., Clara B., George A., Jesse B., Arthur C., Edna B. and Susie E. Mr. Lyon served as postmaster from 1871 until 1877, when he purchased the Rockford Reveille. He was editor briefly, before he entered the state legislature and the banking business with Mr. Mathews in 1877. He became president of the First National Bank in 1883, when it was formed, and held that position until his retirement in 1903. He died the following year on June 18.

His sons, George and Arthur Chandler, followed their father in the banking business. Both George Asa, born in 1871, and Arthur, born in 1874, graduated from Rockford's high school, enrolled at Grinnell College and entered the bank at Marble Rock in the 1890s. George became cashier of the First National Bank at Rockford before entering Harvard Law School and locating in Minneapolis, where he became an assistant cashier and later vice president of a large bnank until his death in 1926. He married Elizabeth McLeon of Rockford in 1905.

Arthur taught school in Rockford where he became principle (1897-1899) and in Mason City in 1900. He graduated from Harvard in 1903 and opened a law office in Des Moines in 1905 and Grinnell in 1908. There he became a member of the board of trustees of Grinnell College (he graduated from Grinnell in 1894), and he was a general attorney for Spaulding Manufacturing Company. In 1925 he was elected superior judge, which was his position at the time of his death in 1928.

Vala, Michael F. The Story of Rockford, 311-312. M.F. Vala Publishing, Dubuque, IA. 1970.

ORIGINAL CITATION:
History of Floyd County, 1882, 489-491; Iowa Biographical Dictionary (1878), 553-554; Harlan, IV, 425, obit.