Dr. Joseph H. Ayers served as the physician for Dyer and the surrounding Crawford County area in the years before and during World War I. Born October 28, 1865, in Arkansas to parents whose own origins trace to Maryland on his father's side and Missouri on his mother's, he grew up in the post-Civil War reconstruction period when the region was shifting from frontier settlement patterns toward more established farm and railroad communities. By the 1910 census he headed a house