A Union officer who later commanded the Grand Army of the Republic in Dakota Territory and fought for a veterans’ home at Hot Springs, William Vincent Lucas also worked as a newspaper publisher, advocated for temperance, and was active in Republican politics, serving a term as United States representative from South Dakota.
Born in a log cabin in Carroll County, Indiana, on 3 July 1835 to Parker and Nancy Lucas, William Lucas had a rudimentary education totaling just eighteen months over six years. He married Sophronia M. Lowe in Henry, Illinois, on 10 August 1856, and the couple began farming near Waverly, Iowa, the following year. They eventually had seven children, several of whom died young. Lucas enlisted in Company B, Fourteenth Regiment, Iowa Volunteer Infantry, in July 1861. He was later promoted to captain and breveted a colonel.
Following the Civil War, Lucas won office as treasurer of Bremer County, Iowa. He bought and owned a succession of newspapers, served as chief clerk of the Iowa House of Representatives, and won the race for mayor of Mason City in 1879 as the temperance candidate. Elected state auditor of Iowa in 1881, he declined a nomination for reelection to follow his sons—a lawyer and a newspaper publisher—to Dakota Territory in the boom year 1883, settling at Chamberlain. Before his election as Brule County treasurer in 1888, he served as commander of the Dakota chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic from 1885 to 1887. During his term, he pushed for the establishment of the Dakota Soldiers’ Home at Hot Springs and beginning in 1890 served as its first “commandant,” along with his wife, who served as matron. In 1892, South Dakota voters elected him to Congress, where he served from March 1893 to March 1895. After being defeated for renomination, he served as register of the United States Land Office in Chamberlain before returning to Hot Springs as commandant of the Soldiers’ Home.
Following the death of his first wife, Lucas married Amanda Louise Avery, the widow of a Union soldier. In 1904, they moved to Santa Cruz, California, where she died in 1920. William V. Lucas died 10 November 1921 and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Santa Cruz.