Ira B. Dutton was born in Stowe, Vermont in 1843, and when he was four years old his family moved west to Janesville, Wisconsin. After graduating from the Milton Academy, later Milton College, he worked in Janesville at a bookstore and was quickly promoted to general clerk. He was also a member of the local volunteer fire department and the librarian of the local Baptist Church Sunday school. Dutton enlisted in Company B of the 13th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry in September 1861. Because of his business background he was quickly promoted to Quarter Master Sergeant in October 1861. In February 1863 he was promoted again to 1st Lieutenant of Company I of the 13th Wisconsin, also in the capacity of Quarter Master. In May 1864 Dutton went on detached service, becoming the Acting Assistant Quarter Master for the Northern District of Alabama, stationed in Decatur, Alabama, a position he held until September 1865. In this important position he was responsible for overseeing supply shipments by rail, riverboat, and mule-train throughout northern Alabama and southern Tennessee. He mustered out with his regiment in December 1865.
After the war he became a civilian employee of the War Department serving in a variety of capacities. First, he worked in northern Alabama and southern Tennessee in the disinterment of Union soldiers for later reinterment in National Cemeteries. He then worked as a war claims adjuster for the Bureau of Refugee, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands and the War Department. During this period of Dutton's life he also ran up a large number of personal debts and committed some unspecified 'sin' that caused him to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1883, taking the name Joseph Dutton upon his conversion.
He entered the Abbey of Gethsemani Trappist Monastery in Kentucky where he stayed for 20 months. While there, Brother Dutton read about the leper colony on Molokai operated by Father Damien. He left the monastery for Molokai, arriving in July 1886. For the next 45 years, Brother Dutton worked among the lepers of Molokai. He lived in a plain, sparsely furnished hut and accepted no pay from the day he arrived on Molokai. When he read of a Memphis Catholic school in desperate need of money he instructed the War Department to send his Army pension payments to the school. He was a loyal member of the G.A.R. and corresponded with G.A.R. comrades in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge honored Dutton for his work on Molokai, and the Brother Dutton School in Beloit was named after him. Dutton died on March 26, 1931 and is buried on Molokai.
