Corpus Christi, Nueces County
Chemist, geologist, and photographer William DeRyee was born as William Düry in Würzburg, Bavaria. He was educated at the Gymnasium and Lateinschule in Würzburg, 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 name to “DeRyee”. After establishing highly effective 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 marine 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, William DeRyee developed remedies for the fever, including 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)