Dyer County, Tennessee: History
=== 19th century ===
Dyer County was founded by a Private Act of Tennessee, passed on October 16, 1823. The area was part of the territory in Tennessee that was previously legally recognized as belonging to the Chickasaw Native Americans as "Indian Lands".
The county was named for Robert Henry Dyer (circa 1774–1826). Dyer had been an army officer in the Creek War and War of 1812, and a cavalry colonel in the First Seminole War of 1818 before becoming a state senator. He was instrumental in the formation of the counties of Dyer and Madison County, Tennessee.
Around 1823, Louis Philippe I stopped briefly near the mouth of the Obion River and killed a bald eagle.
One of the earlier settlers to Dyer County was McCullouch family. Alexander McCullouch, a War of 1812 veteran who served as aid-de-camp under John Coffee at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, moved his family in the late 1820s to a plantation west of Dyersburg from northern Alabama. McCullouch's children were also involved with the development of Dyer County and the nation at large. His youngest daughter, Adelaide, married Albert Pierce, a prominent steamboat agent on the Forked Deer and Mississippi Rivers in the Reconstruction era. McCullough also had multiple sons that served in the American Civil War; Alexander Jr. who served as a colonel and head of the Dyer County Militia, Benjamin, who (according to family lore) learned to hunt bears from Davy Crockett and tried to follow him the Alamo but failed and also was killed at the Battle of Pea Ridge, and Henry who served in the Texas Rangers and married into the Ashby family of True Women fame.
In 1869, three, possibly five, white men were lynched under suspicion of horse thievery.
In May 1874, the Paducah & Memphis Railroad extended it's line from Troy to the Dyer/Obion county line. The town of Trimble was started as a station for the new terminus. A 54-mile railroad gap between Trimble and Covington (in Tipton County) continued to exist until 1882, when the Chesapeake, Ohio, & Southwestern Railroad finished construction on the line to give Dyersburg a rail connection. This line was leased to the Newport News & Mississippi Valley Railroad to operate two years later. In 1897, the line was deeded to the Illinois Central Railroad, who leased it to the Chicago, St. Louis, & New Orleans Railroad, who operated it as their "Louisville Division" (Elizabethtown, KY to Memphis via Paducah).
In Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Twain reported seeing a steamboat at the mouth of the Obion River bearing his name. He notes this is the first time he encountered something named after him.
In 1904, the Dyersburg Northern Railroad was chartered. This line connected Dyersburg to Tiptonville in Lake County and began operating in 1910. The company changed their name to the Chicago, Memphis, & Gulf Railroad in 1909. …