William DeRyee
(May 15, 1825 - May 23, 1903)
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U E C E S C O U N T Y |
Marker No: 18224
Aluminum 27 x 42 Subject Marker
Geographic: 27.800970,-97.399811
Location: IH-37 at Ramirez Street, Corpus Christi
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Marker Text: Chemist, geologist and photographer William DeRyee was born as William Dury in Wurzburg, Bavaria. He was educated at the gymnasium and lateunschule in Wurzburg, then went on to study at the University of Munich. He participated in the 1848 uprising against King Ludwig I, but when it was suppressed, he left with other dissidents to settle in Tennessee here he married his wife, Dorothea Mylius from Saxony, in 1849. They had five children, he also changed his cottonseed mills, he gathered the attention of many copper mine operators and they hired him to investigate their mines. He and his family relocated to New Braunfels, where he developed and demonstrated new photography techniques alongside other German immigrants.
During the Civil War, DeRyee served under the Confederacy as a state chemist to help develop materials for weapons and to find sources of nitrates for the military he also invented smokeless explosives, and materials for marines torpedoes, but these did not see use in the civil war after the war, he moved to Corpus Christi, and opened the DeRyee and Bingham drugstore. In 1867, after a yellow fever epidemic took his son, Emil, as well as physicians in Town, an effective antiseptic. He later represented Nueces County at the world cotton exposition in New Orleans in 1885. He went on to publish important geological research for the state. DeRyee is remembered as a major scientific leader in Texas history. (2015) |