Charles Toliver Dycus: Life and Legacy of a Texas Lawman and Farmer (1871–1935)
By: William V. Scott
Published: March 20, 2024
Updated: April 3, 2024
Charles Toliver Dycus, law enforcement agent, farmer, and businessman in agriculture, was born on December 31, 1871, in Williamson County, Texas, to Toliver Lafayette Dycus and Sarah Catherine (Smith) Dycus, both originally from Georgia. At the time of the 1880 census, the Dycus family farmed in Williamson County. At some point Charles Dycus moved to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), and he married Ella Stroud on December 20, 1898, in Carter County, Southern District of Indian Territory. The couple had six children: Ralph William, Mildred, Johnnie, Toliver Lafayette, and Connell Harwell. Ella Dycus died on March 16, 1910, delivering their last child, Andy Augustus. Young Andy was adopted by Baptist minister, Samuel Francis and Laura Ann (Dotson) Tipton, a local couple.
On the 1900 census, Charles Dycus was a farmer in the Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory. In 1907 the Dycus family moved to Farwell, Texas, in Parmer County. The 1910 census listed him as a Parmer County constable. He then served three years as a marshal for the St. Louis, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific Company, a northern New Mexico coal mining and coking company. Dycus moved to Koehler, New Mexico, a coal mining company town sixteen miles southeast of Raton. He served as the first city marshal of Raton.
Charles T. Dycus married Isamil Cornelia "Fanny" White, a schoolteacher, on February 6, 1917, in Raton, New Mexico. The couple soon moved to Farwell and lived in the local hotel prior to purchasing a small frame house where they reared their four children: Charles Bernol, Nova Lois, Timy Annette, and Julius Young. After moving back to Farwell, Dycus served as deputy sheriff and tax collector in 1917 before he established ownership of the Dycus Livestock Commission Company. As a livestock commission agent at Farwell, he was appointed as a Loyalty Ranger from June 6, 1918, through February 1919. The Loyalty Rangers, authorized by the Hobby Loyalty Act of 1918, were recruited to watch their communities for anti-war sentiment during the last few months of World War I. Dycus bought and sold cattle on commission and also operated a grain and feed business on the Santa Fe Railroad in Farwell. He was still listed as the proprietor of a grain business on the 1930 census, but, with the deepening of the Great Depression when farmers and ranchers started defaulting on their bills on feed and cattle, Dycus’s businesses were some of the first of Farwell’s businesses to fold due to their reliance on agriculture.
In 1934 Dycus, with two or three fellow Farwell men, went to East Texas on a deer hunting trip, where he drank “bad water” which resulted in stomach troubles. On May 24, 1935, at age sixty-three, Charles T. Dycus died of peritonitis caused by “acute indigestion” in Farwell, Texas, and was buried there in Mount Olivet Cemetery.
Bibliography:
“Charlie Toliver Dycus,” Find A Grave Memorial (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/36497841/charlie-toliver-dycus), accessed February 22, 2024. “Ella Stroud Dycus,” Find A Grave Memorial (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/36497847/ella_stroud_dycus), accessed February 22, 2024. Charles H. Harris III, Frances E. Harris, and Louis R. Sadler, Texas Ranger Biographies: Those Who Served 1910–1921 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009). Parmer County Historical Commission, Prairie Progress (Dallas: Taylor, 1981).
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The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
William V. Scott, “Dycus, Charles Toliver,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/dycus-charles-toliver.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
TID:
FDYCU
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- March 20, 2024
- April 3, 2024
