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The story above appeared in several 1903/1904 newspapers, in the 1904
Everett disaster
book, and was referenced in the Iroquois Theater fire centennial books of 2003. Daniel Webster Dimmick (1840–1913) was sixty-three at the time
of the Iroquois Theater fire, not seventy, but in 1903 when life expectancy
was only forty-seven, he qualified as old. I've not found anything
published that identifies the other four members in his theater party;
his wife, Sarah Ann Irvine Dimmick (1844–1916), and another couple seems
likely.▼1
Daniel was a farmer who lived in Apple River, IL on the farm
where he'd been born. His father, Lott Dimmick, had
come from Ohio in 1825 to settle in Jo Daviess county at the northwestern
corner of Illinois near Dubuque, Iowa and Platteville, Wisconsin.
Daniel
served as a sergeant in the ninety-sixth regiment of the Illinois volunteer
infantry of the Union army. He was present at the Atlanta, Franklin and
Nashville campaigns.
A description of his involvement is online. Two of his brothers, George
and Harvey Dimmick, died in the conflict. While on leave in 1864
Daniel voted for president Abraham Lincoln.
Daniel and Sarah had five
children, including one son who died of illness as a teen ager.
Earlier
in 1903 Daniel had been a member of the executive committee that planned the
twenty-first reunion of veterans of the Civil War and Spanish-American war
veterans from Jo Daviess County.
The Mt. Hope Cemetery in Shullsburg,
Wisconsin contains the
Dimmick family plot.
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