Mini Bios of People of Scots Descent
Dyer H. Campbell Biography

DYER H. CAMPBELL, the able and popular sheriff of Brookings county, is a native of the old Keystone state of the Union, having been born in the town of Edinboro, Erie county, Pennsylvania, on the 28th of November, 1858, a son of John W. and Susan (Walker) Campbell, the former of whom was likewise born in that county, in 1817, being a son of John and Mary (Laughrey) Campbell, who were natives of Scotland. the grandfather having emigrated thence to America in the early part of the seventeenth century. He located in Pennsylvania, where he devoted the remainder of his life to agricultural pursuits. The father of the subject was likewise identified with the great basic art of agriculture and was also engaged in the mercantile business in Edinboro. while he served two terms as a member of the Pennsylvania legislature. In 1865 he removed with his family to Olmstead county, Minnesota, where he was engaged in farming for the ensuing three years. In 1869 he removed to the town of Rochester, that county, where he was for six years an attache of the office of register of deeds. He served as justice of the peace and held other offices of local trust and responsibility, his death occurring in Rochester in 1887, while his widow was summoned into eternal rest in 1892, at Moorhead, Minnesota. Of their three children we enter the following brief record: John V. is a resident of Erie, Pennsylvania; Martha J. became the wife of Arthur G. Lewis, of Moorhead, Minnesota, and is now deceased, and Dyer H. is the immediate subject of this sketch. 

Dyer H. Campbell was seven years of age at the time of his parents' removal from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, and there he attended the district schools until the family located in Rochester, where he continued his studies in the public schools for two or three years. At the age of fifteen years he initiated his independent career securing a position in a meat market in Rochester, and being thereafter employed in the same and in a grocery about three years. He then secured a position in an abstract insurance office, in which he remained until 1881, when he came to Brookings, Dakota, having been married about two years previously. Upon arriving in Brookings he secured a position in what was then the Brookings County Bank, but is now the First National Bank, where he held the office of assistant cashier until the institution was reorganized as the First National Bank, in 1883, from which time forward he continued to retain the position of assistant cashier until the 1st of January, 1903, when he resigned his office to assume the duties of the shrievalty, having been elected sheriff of the county in November of the preceding year, as the candidate of the Republican party. Sheriff Campbell served for fifteen terms as city treasurer of Brookings, while for seventeen years he was secretary of the Brookings Building and Loan Association. For the past twenty years he has been identified with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and is one of its prominent representatives in the state, being at the present time grand master of the grand lodge in South Dakota. He is also a member of Brookings Lodge, No. 24 Free and Accepted Masons, as well as of the Modern Woodmen of America and other fraternal bodies of auxiliary character. He has served four years as chief of the fire department of Brookings, and has been chosen as incumbent for another term of two years. He is one of the wheelhorses of the Republican party in the county, and is chairman of the county central committee at the time of this writing, while he has been a delegate to various state and county conventions of the party. He and his family attend the Presbyterian church. 

On the 9th of November, 1879, Mr. Campbell was united in marriage to Miss Emma Haber, a daughter of George and Melissa Haber, the former of whom was born in Germany and the latter in the state of Ohio, and of this union have been born six children, namely: Walter, who is serving as deputy sheriff; Bertha is the wife of E. F. McCarl; Arthur, Martha and Horace, who remain at the parental home; and Harriet. who died at the age of one year.