Sheffield Ingalls

“ Stringfellow said:
“The abolitionists shoot down our men without provocation wherever they meet them. Let us retaliate in the same manner. A free fight is all we desire. If murder and assassination is the program of the day we are in favor of filling the bill. Let not the knives of the pro-slavery men be sheathed while there is one abolitionist in the territory. As they have shown no quarters to our men they deserve none from us. Let our motto be written in blood upon our flags. ‘Death to all Yankees and Traitors in Kansas.’ We have 150 men in Atchison ready to start in an hour’s notice. ”

“ Atchison county has always been particularly proud of the high order of talent that has graced its bench and bar. From the very earliest days of its history, the legal profession has been well represented here. Men who have reached a high order of distinction in the profession have had their beginning at the bar of this county. In fact, this county has been somewhat unique in this respect, for there is perhaps no other county in Kansas that has furnished a greater number of distinguished representatives of this noble profession, who have shed their luster upon the fair name of the State. ”

“ During the terrible drought of 1860, when scores of families deserted their homes and left the State, he and his family were among those who decided to remain and win out over the vagaries of nature. His faith in the future of Kansas was amply justified as the years rolled on and ever increasing prosperity came to him and his, as a just and equitable reward for a faith and confidence bestowed upon the new country during a time which tried men’s souls and caused weaker mortals to give up the fight. ”

“ He was a pioneer in the establishment of the great wholesale houses which have made Atchison famous over the western country. Beginning his career a poor man, endowed with financial and business ability of a high order, blessed with a keen foresight into the future, having confidence in the ultimate development of the country, tireless and industrious in all his undertakings, he achieved a truly remarkable success, and through it all he was a man among men, who never lost the respect and regard of his fellow men because of his great success in the realms of business and finance. ”

“ Of the class of better citizens mentioned as doing things for the betterment of the condition of the citizenry, Z. E. Jackson, attorney of Atchison, occupies a prominent place in the city. Gifted as an attorney, upright in all of his dealings with his fellow men, interested to a high degree in the welfare of his fellow citizens, he has striven unselfishly to do good. Jackson Park, named after this gentleman, represents the culmination of one of his dreams and years of endeavor to create a breathing place of woodland beauty and a public playground of which the city may well be proud. ”

“ Sumner’s first citizens came mostly from Massachusetts, and were imbued with the spirit of creed and cant, self-reliance and fanaticism that could have been born only on Plymouth Rock. They had come to the frontier to make Kansas a free State and to build a city, within whose walls all previous conditions of slavery should be disregarded and where all men born should be regarded equal. The time—1856—was auspicious. Kansas was both a great political and military battlefield, upon which the question of the institution of slavery was to be settled for all time. ”

“ But modern medicine does not stop at treating or curing people. It does something even bigger and better—it tries to keep them well. Indeed, the medical profession is the only immolating profession there is—the only profession that is all the time trying, by its efforts in the direction of preventive medicine, to destroy its only source of income—the treatment of disease—by doing all within its power to make disease less and less prevalent. ”

“ His life has been a well rounded and useful one, and he has had a career of which he and his children and grandchildren can well be proud. His long life has been clean and for years he has been a stern advocate of temperance and has practiced his own belief. In his younger days he was a noted and powerful orator who had the ability to thrill and sway his hearers. Few men can look back over a longer vista of years, well spent in honest pursuits, and in behalf of his fellow men than George W. Thompson. All honor to him as the oldest and most distinguished living pioneer of Atchison today. ”

“ This thought and belief is comforting alike to the dying and the bereaved ones left behind to mourn their earthly loss for the time being. Longfellow has written: “Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal; dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not written of the soul.” So thought and so lived the late Capt. James Granville Morrow, who at the time of his demise was the oldest living pioneer resident of Atchison, and a man famed for his upright life and beloved for his good and kindly deeds. ”

“ We no longer marvel at the volume of trade and freight tonnage and the multitude of travelers that pass through Atchison every year. We take these things as a matter of course, and make no note of the daily arrival and departure of the fifty-six passenger trains at our union depot every day; we marvel not at the speed and the ease and comfort with which we can make the trip to St. Louis or Chicago, over night, or to Denver in less than twenty-four hours, or to New York in two and one-half days, and to San Francisco in less than five, surrounded by every luxury money can buy. ”

“ The ranks of the grand army of brave and true men who have worn the blue are gradually thinning out, and where once they were numbered in hundreds and thousands throughout this broad land, there are now but few in each community. These veterans were of the salt of the earth, and no better type of manhood ever trod the earth or marched to the strains of martial music than the old guard, which saved the Union, at the call of Abraham Lincoln. Living on a farm, in the northwest part of Benton township, Atchison county, Kansas, is a survivor of General Sherman’s victorious “march to the sea.” ”

“ It was not merely land hunger and lust for personal gain that were the impelling motives which brought men to Kansas in that day. Neither gold, nor gas, nor oil, nor precious gems lured men here. Kansas was then, as it is now, an agricultural paradise, and such an environment has ordinarily but little charm for the daring adventurer and the seeker after sudden riches, who toil not and spin less. ”

“ When one thinks of Atchison it is only natural to refer to the city as the home of Balie Waggener, who is indisputably grouped among the prominent and widely known figures who have shed fame and luster upon their home city. A leading attorney, statesman, progressive citizen, builder, farmer and stockman, friend of all children, capitalist, and public benefactor are some of the terms which might be applied to him without fear of contradiction from the mass of the people who know him best. ”

“ The late Albert Barnes Harvey, of Muscotah, Kan., during the course of a long and notable career, covering ever forty years in Atchison county, accomplished much in a material sense and left behind him an unimpeachable record for integrity and upright living which will long endear his memory to his former mortal associates. He lived in the days when men were more closely drawn together in the great struggle to create a State from a wilderness of prairie and unpeopled waste, and did his part in the development of his adopted county, of which he was one of the real pioneers. ”

“ But before the well laid plans of our citizens matured, before projects for the development of steam transportation to bring us nearer the outside world could be concluded the mighty conflict which ended in four bloody years of civil war, broke upon the Nation, and Kansas within three months after being admitted as a State enrolled itself on the side of the Union. Atchison county sprang to arms almost a thousand strong, and may it ever be said to its everlasting glory that few, if any, counties in the State had a more patriotic record. ”

“ Newcomb loves his home city, its people and prestige and is proud of its standing among the cities of the West. He has had no small part in the upbuilding of Atchison, and it would have been better in the days gone by if the city had more men like him to assist its growth. Ever ready to contribute to any enterprise which might help the growth of the city, his liberality and boosting proclivities became proverbial, and it has oft been a saying of his that Atchison could just as well have been a city of fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants as to be its present size. ”

“ One of the most interesting and at the same time one of the most difficult tasks in tracing the settlement of a community, is to correctly catalogue the establishment of the first settler, the first house, the first business institution, and the first of everything, and it could with safety be said that this is not only an interesting and difficult task but it is well nigh an impossible one. ”

“ It is true that a large number of peaceful, plodding home-seekers—the tillers of the soil—the hewers of wood and the haulers of water, immigrated to Kansas to take up land and build permanent homes, but they were in the minority prior to 1860. The tremendous issue of human slavery was the all absorbing fact, and the long struggle here wrought a complete revolution in the political thought of the whole country. Men came to Kansas for the most part for political rather than for business or agricultural reasons. The settlement of Kansas was an inspired political movement of partisans. ”

“ ALFRED JONATHAN HARWI. In writing the history of a city and county such as Atchison, the reviewer very naturally finds that among the large number of men who have had much to do with the upbuilding of the community, and who can be counted among the really successful men of the period covered, there are few who stand out preëminently among their fellows, and whose individuality looms far above the average, and who are noted not only for their individual accomplishments on their own behalf, but who have performed deeds which have endeared their memory to posterity for generations to come. ”

“ Today, in this section of the State, these primitive conditions can hardly be imagined. Nearly every country doctor now has an automobile, and crosses gullies and streams on concrete bridges and travels over ‘dragged’ roads. Instead of passing through a sparsely settled country, he finds a fine large farm house on nearly every ‘quarter’ or ‘eighty’ supplemented by a substantial barn and spacious granaries. He passes a school house every few miles and occasionally a rural church, and lives in a comfortable, modern home in a flourishing, well kept country town. ”