Maggie (Miner) Dull
(1888-1953)
Maggie
(Miner) Dull was born on Feb. 10, 1888 in Wilmerding, Allegheny County, PA,
the eldest of 12 children of William
Henry ‘Squire’ and Sara Jane (Basinger) Minerd.
As a 9-year-old girl, Maggie and her parents moved to Mill Run, Fayette County, PA, near where her father had been born.
On May 20, 1931, Maggie married widower Irvin Romanus Dull (1881-1953), the son of John and Jane (Bailey) Dull. Irvin’s first wife, Amelia (Long) Dull, had passed away of tuberculosis.
Irvin and Maggie had no children. She was a homemaker, and he was a farmer. They belonged to the Mill Run Evangelical United Brethren Church.
The Shadow of Death visited this couple three times in the fateful year of 1953. On March 3 of that year, Maggie’s father Henry, a longtime justice of the peace and widely respected man in the community, died in Mill Run.
Sadly, just
four months later, on July 29, 1953, Irvin passed away. In his diary, neighbor
and cousin Albert ‘Ward’ Minerd
noted, “Irwin Dull died this morning.” He was laid to rest at the Indian
Creek Baptist Church Cemetery. Ward noted that his wife Ada
“went to Irwin Dull’s funeral with Dessie and Orville Firestone.”
Just five months after that, on Nov. 14, 1953, Maggie died. Ward Minerd wrote in his diary that “Maggie Dull died this morning.” A few days later, he wrote that he “went up to see Maggy Dull that is laying a corpse at the Sam Johnson house or Irwin Dull House.”
The Dulls are mentioned in the 1970 book, A History of Mill Run.
Copyright © 2004, 2007 Mark A. Miner