“Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” was submitted for copyright deposit on June 28, 1855, by Firth, Pond & Co.

According to Evelyn Foster Morneweck’s The Chronicles of Stephen Foster’s Family: 

Stephen did not produce many songs in 1855, but he published two of his best; “Hard Times Come Again No More” was copyrighted January 17, the day before his mother died; “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” appeared in June. “Hard Times” is wholly a song of the people; it was probably composed in November or December of 1854, when Stephen saw many of his own good friends amongst the helpless victims of hard times right in the neighborhood of his home. That winter in Pittsburgh and Allegheny was a time of great distress owing to the shutting down of the mills. Morrison’s accounts show no income at all from the Hope Cotton Mill in 1854, and a contemporary newspaper article states that the suffering amongst the families of the unemployed was pitiful. Stephen’s mother would have known everybody in the neighborhood that needed help; no one in trouble was ever turned from her door. “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” is written in an entirely different vein, being a song of love and happy youth. Stephen composed and practiced this lovely quartette with the assistance of his two nieces, Lidie Wick taking the soprano part and Mary Wick singing the alto, while their Uncle Stephen played the piano accompaniment. There are few of that generation who do not remember what an overwhelming success it was. “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” is such a supremely beautiful arrangement of simple harmo”nies that it deserves a place high amongst American musical classics.

Regarding the songs popularity in the US South, she writes:

Stephen’s songs continued to have a large sale in the Southern States, but to no benefit to himself or his northern publishers. A number of southern music houses, on receiving sheet music from the North, calmly appropriated it to their own use as they did not consider themselves bound by Union copyright laws. All restrictions were removed, and thousands of Confederate editions were reprinted from the publications of Firth, Pond and other northern companies. It might have been that the New York publishers did the same thing with southern compositions, but the best composers seem all to have been Northerners, or living in the North when war was declared. The late Walter R. Whittlesey, of the Library of Congress, discovered hundreds of Confederate songs with a large number of Stephen Foster’s songs advertised on the back pages. Mr. Whittlesey stated that the Foster songs that seemed the most popular in the Confederacy were “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming,” “Fairy Belle,” “I See Her Still in My Dreams,” “Lula Is Gone,” “Parthenia to Ingomar,” and “Why No One to Love.”

When describing Foster’s funeral, she writes:

A band of musicians was assembled in Allegheny Cemetery, and after Stephen’s casket had been lowered into the grave, they played “Old Folks at Home” and “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming.”