Lucius Nelson Dills

Lucius Nelson Dills

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/24183396/lucius_dills

Dills was the first of the nine children of John Harmon and Julia Ellen Dills (Desha), was born at Cynthiana, Harrison County, Kentucky, on July 7, 1858. Three brothers and a sister died in childhood.

Two years after he matriculated at Professor Newton F. Smjth's Select School in 1873, the family moved to Sherman, Texas, where in 1877 Lucius joined the law office of Silas Hare and Henry O. Head.

He was admitted to the bar by Judge Joseph Bledsoe at McKinney, Collin County, on his twenty-first birthday, leaving Sherman on March 2, 1882, for the Panhandle, settling first in Mobeetie and then Tascosa. When he stood for district attorney in the fall of 1884, he was he eliminated by Charles Goodnight, "the recipient and beneficiary of more obsequiously lying propaganda and laudation than any individual ever to have lived in the watershed of Red River."

In May 1885 he moved to Lincoln County, where he ran a store at Noga. And worked as a cowboy. In March 1888 he entered a law partnership with Moses Wiley but found the road too rocky and instead went to work for Pat Garrett in Roswell. In 1890 he opened a law office there "and made a meager living."

In 1891 he and Joseph Desha Lea launched the Roswell Record, still published to this day. Later that year he returned to Sherman to practice law and married Joe Lea's sister Gertrude on April 24, 1892. Returning to Roswell he sold his interest in the newspaper in 1898, abandoned the law, and become a surveyor.

In the Spring of 1904, he was appointed city engineer, a post be held for four years before returning to private practice. In that position he created the ground plans and superintended the erection of the Masonic Temple and, in the fall of 1911, the Chaves County Courthouse.

After a brief stint as editor of the (short-lived) Roswell Morning News, he was appointed surveyor general of New Mexico, and he held that office for eight years. After some years of ill health, he was appointed to a post in the state highways department.

He died at Roswell on December 1, 1944.

Dills, "Life and Times," Haley, Interview with Lucius Dills, June 12, 1935.

33 Degree Grandmaster A.F. & A.M. New Mexico 1922