DYER, Mrs. Julia Knowlton, philanthropist, born in Deerfield, N. H., in 1829. Her father
JULIA KNOWLTON DYER.
was Joseph Knowlton, and her mother Susan Dearborn. Upon Bunker Hill Monument are inscribed the names of her mother s grandfather, Nathaniel Dearborn, and of her own grandfather, Thomas Knowlton. Julia Knowlton was one of six children. Her father served in the war of 1812, and his namesake, her brother, Joseph H. Knowlton, was a member of the secret expedition against Fort Beaufort, in the Civil War. After graduation in her eighteenth year. Miss Knowlton taught a year in the high school in Manchester, N. H., where she was a successful instructor in French and English literature and higher mathematics. She became the wife, in her twenty-first year, of Micah
Dyer, jr., now a lawyer of Boston. Three children were born to them, two sons and a daughter, the latter dying in infancy. The two sons still live. Dr. William K. Dyer, of Boston, and Walter Dyer. Mrs. Dyer is connected prominently with twenty-four associations, only one of which, the Castilian Club, is purely literary. She is president of the Soldiers' Home in Massachusetts, president and founder of the Charity Club, a member of the executive boards of the Home for Intemperate Women, the Helping Hand Association, and president of the local branch of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. For twenty-six years she has been a manager for the Home for Female Prisoners in Dedham, Mass., and is a life member of the Bostonian Society. The association appoints a board of twenty-four women, two of whom visit the Soldiers's Home each month to look after the needs of the inmates. She is a member of the Methodist Church, but she attends regularly the services of her husband's choice, in the Church of the Unity, Boston, without comment, but without affecting her own faith in the slightest. Mrs. Dyer
is so engaged in philanthropic work that she hardly thinks of herself as being a leader.