Wayne County Biographies



Part of the Indiana Biographies Project



George R. Dilks

A representative business man of Spring Grove, a suburb of Richmond, Wayne county, is the subject of this biographical sketch, George R. Dilks. Born in the city of Philadelphia, October 20, 1854, he passed the first seven years of his life there, but, from the opening year of the civil war until the present he has looked upon Richmond as his home, though he has been absent, as his business interests required, for perhaps several years at a time.

George Dilks, father of our subject, was a very successful business man and able financier. Nearly all of his active life was spent in the Quaker city, where he carried on a large wholesale and retail lumber trade, also doing contracting and building to quite an extent. Among the business men of his city he was very highly esteemed, and bore a truly enviable reputation for uprightness, reliability and fairness in all his transactions. In the Society of Friends he was a prominent and valued member, filling many official positions in his own church. He was a native of Gloucester, New Jersey, born in 1804, and died in his prime, at his pleasant home in Philadelphia, February 16, 1855. He had married Hannah H. Richie, May 30, 1837, and she survived him about a quarter of a century, her demise occurring July 5, 1880, in Richmond, when she was in her sixty-fifth year.

It has always been a matter of regret to George R. Dilks that he lost his noble father ere he was old enough to have his parent's memory impressed upon his mind. The loving mother strove to fill the lack of a father's judiclous care and guidance in her son's life, and to her watchfulness, wisdom and example he attributes much of his success in later years. In 1861 the family came to the neighborhood of Richmond, and in the public schools of this place George R. received his elementary education. Subsequently he ;attended the excellent old boarding school of the Friends at Westtown, Chester county, Pennsylvania. At eighteen or twenty years of age he left his studies and launched his bark on the uncertain sea of commercial life. For a short time he was in the employ of the Richmond Church & School Furniture Company, and then for four years he worked for George H. Grant & Company. His next employment was with T. H. Hill in the grain business, and in the autumn of 1880 he engaged as superintendent of the Chicago Linseed Oil Company. At the end of a year he resigned his position with that firm, and, going to Indianapolis, became superintendent of the linseed-oil works of J. P. Evans & Company, a large and wealthy concern, with which he was connected for some five years, or until the death of Mr. Evans. In 1886 Mr. Dilks became superintendent of the plant of Haynes, Spencer & Company, manufacturers of church furniture, in Richmond, and, at the end of two years' service with that house he associated himself with the firm of W. J. Banners & Sons, of Philadelphia, wholesale dealers in hardwood lumber, and ran a branch office in Richmond, also representing them on the road, up tp 1891. The five years that followed he traveled in the interests of M. B. Farrin, of Cincinnati, Ohio, and since 1896 he has been engaged in the wholesale lumber business on his own account in Richmond, and has succeeded in establishing a large and constantly increasing patronage. Strictly upright, prompt and thoroughly reliable in his business methods, he merits the custom which he enjoys and the confidence which is freely reposed in him by those who are acquainted with him. As he was reared in the faith of the Society of Friends, his whole life has been strongly influenced by the example and precepts of the same. In political matters he is to be found on the side of the Republican party. Socially he belongs to the Central Traveling Men's Association, whose headquarters are in Indianapolis, and he was actively identified with the organization of Post C of the Travelers' Protective Association, in Richmond, and he is now president of the same. Personally, he is very popular with all who know him, for he readily wins friends by his genial courtesy and kindliness of heart.

The pleasant home of George R. Dilks is at Spring Grove, a pretty suburb of Richmond. He was married October 31, 1876, to Miss Alice J. Hill, a sketch of whose parents, George and Tacy (Hibberd) Hill, is presented elsewhere in this work. The six children of Mr. and Mrs. Dilks are Grace R., George H., Benjamin H. (deceased), Harrie R., Annie G. and Dorothy E.

Source:
Biographical and Genealogical History of Wayne, Fayette, Union and Franklin Counties, Indiana, Volume 1, The Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago, 1899