Ira Barnes Dutton was born in Stowe, Vermont on April 27, 1843, the oldest son of Ezra and Abigail Barnes Dutton. The Dutton’s had four children, but Ira was the only one who survived those early years. In late 1847, when Ira was four years old, the family moved to Rock County and settled in Janesville. Ira Barnes Dutton, known to the world as Brother Dutton, and famed for his work and sacrifice among the lepers of Molokai, spent his youth and early adulthood in Rock County.

Brought up with Episcopalian traditions, he was home schooled by his mother until the age of 12. He then enrolled in the Milton Academy (Milton College). Ira got his first part time job at the age of eight or nine working for the Janesville Gazette. Between the ages of 10 and 16 he worked at Sutherland’s Bookstore where he mastered the art of printing and book binding. He also improved in health and strength by exercising for two hours every night after work in a rented gym with equipment he and his friends bought. Ira joined the “Wide Awake” Club, a forerunner of the Republican Party, at the age of 13. He joined the Janesville Fire Brigade at the age of 15; and at the age of 18 he joined a semi-military organization called the Janesville Zouave Corp. By this time he was considered to be an expert horseman.

It was in the late summer of 1861 that the Zouave Corp enrolled en masse in the Union Army to form Company B of the Wisconsin 13^th Infantry. He was sworn in as a private on September 9, 1861, but because of his special abilities he was transferred to the Quartermaster Corp. He advanced rapidly from Sergeant, to Sergeant Major to 2^nd Lieutenant regimental Quartermaster Company I. He was a 1^st Lieutenant (brigade) when he was post quartermaster in Decatur, Alabama, reporting to Major General Donaldson in Nashville, Tennessee. On march 2, 1865 Dutton was promoted to Captain upon the recommendations of Generals Donaldson, Rosseau, Granger and Thomas.

On January 1, 1866, Ira Dutton married in Mount Vernon, Ohio to Louisa Headington, a girl he befriended in Nashville. He was discharged from the army in Madison, Wisconsin. The dark years of Dutton’s life had just begun. After a failed business venture in Alabama, a wife who abandoned him, a gruesome government job of disinterment and reburial of war dead and a job running a distillery in the backwoods of Mississippi, Dutton was a broken man. After subjecting himself to these repugnant conditions and displaying a pattern of abuse of liquor, he had lost his ambition and his moral foundation. He tried to resurrect his life during a job with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, but after a drinking spree in July of 1876, his job was terminated. How-ever, it also put to an end a fifteen-year period of self-destruction.

He resolved to abstain forever and he did. In late 1876 at the age of 34, he had taken a job as a conciliator for the War Department making investigations concerning war claims. He held this job for eight years, paying off all of his debts. It was during this time that he filed for divorce in Mount Vernon, Ohio from a wife he had not seen in years. The divorce was finalized on May 27, 1881. Past experiences weighed heavily upon Dutton’s conscience. Several Christian religious leaders took an interest in him and introduced him to religious study. He studied several years before deciding to embrace the Catholic faith.

Ira was formally baptized on his 40^th birthday in 1883 in St. Peter’s Dominican Church in Memphis, Tennessee. It was then that he took the name Joseph. After completing his service as an U.S. commissioner in the late summer of 1884, Dutton entered the Trappist Monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky resolving to make a life style change. It was a time of complete silence, hard work, prayer and re-flection. He spent 20 months there, but he felt called to do more humanitarian work.

Even though Joseph Dutton never took simple vows, he was always referred to as Brother Dutton from that time on. It was through the invitation of a Redemptorist priest to a conference in New Orleans in 1884 and a trip to Notre Dame University that Joseph Dutton learned of the work of Father Damien on Molokai. Taking an emigrant train to San Francisco, a barge to Honolulu and a steamer ferry to Molokai, he was rowed to an offshore point where he waded ashore. There he met Father Damien who was expecting more lepers on Molokai. Brother Dutton presented himself with this simple statement. “My name is Joseph Dutton and I have come here to help you in your work.” It was July 29, 1886.

Brother Dutton was a very organized and caring man and he complemented the work of Father Damien. In addition to being experienced as a quartermaster, builder, accountant, nurse and grave-digger, Brother Dutton was an intense patriot who commun-icated well with the outside world. He was honored for his work at GAR encampments. Every president from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt praised his accomplishments.

In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt described Brother Dutton as a national hero and ordered Admiral Sperry’s Great White Fleet of 16 battleships to detour on its trip to Japan in order to “pass in review” by the leper colony in his honor. Brother Dutton never left the leper colony at Kalawao until late 1930 when as a frail man of 87, he was forced to go to Honolulu for eye surgery. It was there that he met Father Joseph Hanz from Beloit who had erected Brother Dutton School in 1926 in Beloit to honor the man who devoted so many years to his God and country.

Brother Dutton died on March 26, 1931. Former President Calvin Coolidge wrote his obituary to the nation. He was given a military escort back to Kalawao where his body was buried next to that of Father Damien, the “leper priest” he had buried in April of 1889.