Lyman, William

Born: 1810-08-03 Massachusetts

Died: 1865-12-19 Rockford, Illinois

William Lyman was a physician, state legisltor, and army surgeon. He graduated from Union College in Schenectady, New York in 1829. Lyman was married to a woman named Sarah who died in 1843, and the following spring he married Julia Ann Hill and together they raised six children. They settled in Rockford, Illinois around 1850, where Lyman was a founding Freemason in Rockford Lodge No. 102 in 1851 and an incorporator of the Rockford Gas Light and Coke Company four years later. In the early 1850s, he was the first permanent president of the Winnebago County Medical Society and was vice-president of the state medical society in 1858. He represented Winnebago County in the Illinois House of Representatives, 1855 to 1856, at which time Abraham Lincoln identified him as an Anti-Nebraska Democrat, but the following year he was a delegate to the Illinois Anti-Nebraska Convention which effectively founded the Illinois Republican Party. During the Civil War, Lyman served as a surgeon in the Forty-Fifth Infantry Regiment of Illinois Volunteers. In 1860, he owned real estate valued at $2,000 and $4,000 in personal property.

Charles A. Church, History of Rockford and Winnebago County Illinois (Rockford, IL: W. P. Lamb, 1900), 347, 349, 367; Newton Bateman and Paul Selby, eds., Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Winnebago County, ed. Charles A. Church (Chicago: Munsell, 1916), 2:1140; Union University, Centennial Catalog, 1795-1895 of the Officers and Alumni of Union College in the City of Schenectady, N.Y. (Troy, NY: Troy Times, 1895), 36; Sarah Lyman Gravestone, Hill Cemetery, Windsor, MA; Massachusetts, U.S., Marriage Records, 1840-1915, 1844, Stockbridge (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2013); U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Worthington, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, 34; John Clayton, comp., The Illinois Fact Book and Historical Almanac, 1673-1968 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 221; List of Members of the Illinois Legislature in 1855; Ezra M. Prince, ed., Meeting of May 29, 1900 Commemorative of the Convention of May 29, 1856 That Organized the Republican Party in Illinois, vol. 3 of Transactions of the McLean County Historical Society (Bloomington, IL: Pantagraph, 1900), 152; William O. Ensign, “Early Medical Organization in Illinois and the Rock River Medical Society,” Illinois Medical Journal 13 (January, 1908): 188; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Rockford, Winnebago County, IL, 227-28; The History of Winnebago County, Ill., its Past and Present (Chicago: H. F. Kett, 1877), 322; Chicago Tribune (IL), 28 December 1865, 2:5.