William DeRyee

DeRyee's most original work was with light. In New Braunfels in 1857 he developed a photographic process without silver or mercury that he called homeography, which made multiple copies of drawings and was used to print Texas cotton bonds during the Civil War. In San Antonio he partnered with Carl von Iwonski, photographed the Eighth Legislature, and made two well-known portraits of Sam Houston in 1860. As state chemist he then ran the Texas percussion cap works, and his smokeless explosive and marine torpedoes came too late to be used.

What the plaque says

William DeRyee 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)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 0.6 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 0.8 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 1.0 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 1.2 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• Eli Todd Merriman — steps away
• Thomas S. Parker — steps away
• James Downing — steps away
• Louis de Planque — steps away