Born in Clinton County, Ohio, June 12, 1827, a son of Thornton Tyson, a native of Virginia and an early settler of Clinton County. The family afterward moved to Cuss County, Indiana, where the father died, and subsequently the mother accompanied our subject to Iowa and made his house her home until her death. Oliver Tyson remained at home until 1850, when he joined the great procession to the Pacific coast, going overland to California, where he remained engaged in mining until 1854, and then returned to Indiana and a year and a half later came to Iowa and located in Webster County. In 1858 he bought a saw-mill and operated it many years, adding a flour mill to it in 1866. He operated these mills until 1876, when he sold out to Bond & Post. These mills, as well as the village that grew up around them, were long known as Tyson's Mills. In 1874 Mr. Tyson platted the village which was then called Vesper. About two years later the Webster City & Crooked Creek Railroad Company laid out that portion of the town that lies on the east side of the river and called it Lackawanna, and about a year later the two plats received the name of Lehigh. On retiring from the milling business Mr. Tyson continued in the coal business in which he had also been engaged, and in 1880 embarked in the mercantile business. He is one of the representative men of' the town and has always taken an interest in anything that tended to advance its best interests. In polities he was reared a Whig, and on the formation of the Republican party became identified with that great organization and affiliated with it through the trying scenes of the war and of the reconstruction of' the States. In 1875, believing that the financial interests of the country would be promoted by the adoption of the principles of the Greenback party, he engaged heartily in the advocacy of those principles, in fact was one of the founders of that party in Iowa, organizing at Lehigh, in the fall of 1875, the second Greenback club in the State. In the fall of 1877 he was elected on that ticket to a seat in the Legislature of Iowa. Mr. Tyson was married in the fall of 1855 to Roxcena Maris, a native of Ohio.
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