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American History
Henry Van Deman Faris |
HENRY VAN DEMAN FARIS, of Kanopolis, is a Kansas around whom
center many associations of territorial and pioneer times. He is by five years the oldest
living pioneer in Kansas west of Salina. He has been continuously identified with
Ellsworth County more than half a century.
Mr. Faris comes of that adventuresome pioneer stock that in successive waves has peopled
and developed American soil. His grandfather, John Faris, was born in Ireland of Scotch
descent. On coming to this country he participated as a soldier in the struggle for
independence, and afterwards became a farmer in Virginia. He located on what was then the
far western frontier, along the Ohio River in Ohio County, Virginia, now West Virginia,
not far from the small settlement then but now the City of Wheeling. He died there many
years before Henry V. Faris was born. He married a Miss Stuart, also of Scotch family.
Robert Faris, father of Henry V., was born in Ohio County in what is now West Virginia in
1801. He grew up and married in his native county, took up farming, and in 1828 left the
comparatively well settled region around Wheeling and journeyed into the woods of Delaware
County, Ohio, where he developed a farm. Then, in 1863, he again took up the journey and
made the last stage toward the West, locating on a farm in Marshall County, Illinois,
where he spent his last years and died in 1867. He was a man of decided convictions and a
natural leader among men. He espoused the whig party and subsequently became a republican
of the so-called black republican type. Long before popular attention was attracted to the
subject he was an advocate of woman suffrage and of the prohibition cause. He served as an
elder in the Presbyterian Church many years and in early life belonged to the
Ohio Militia. Robert Faris married Margaret Irwin, who was born in the State of Ohio, near
the Virginia line, and died on the farm in Delaware County, Ohio. She was the mother of
four children: Ann, Irwin,
Mary G. and a daughter that died in infancy, all the others being also deceased. For his
second wife Robert Faris married Hester Maxwell. She was born in Ohio County, Virginia, in
1806 and died in Delaware County, Ohio, in 1855. Her father, William Maxwell, was born in
Scotland, came to America in time to participate in the Revolutionary war, and spent his
active life as a farmer in Ohio County, Virginia, where he died in the early part of the
last century. He married a Miss McClain, also a native
of Scotland, and she died in Western Virginia in the latter '40s. Robert and Hester Faris
had a family of seven children, the oldest being Henry Van Deman. The second, George
Washington, enlisted in the
Fourth Ohio Infantry early in the Civil war, was taken ill and sent home on a furlough and
died in 1863. W. H. H., of the Ninety-sixth Ohio Infantry, was a farmer and lived in
Ellsworth County, Kansas, until his death in April, 1916. Amzi M., of the Eleventh
Illinois Cavalry, is a farmer four miles east and one mile north of Kanopolis. Margaret J.
married Theodore Ruth, a prominent resident of Pomona, California. Mr. Ruth was for many
years agent for the Wells Fargo & Company express at Pomona, was the first postmaster
of that city, and is now a pensioner of the express company and is a well to do citizen,
employing the leisure of his employment for the operation of a greenhouse. The daughter
Sarah E. lives at Manhattan, Kansas, the widow of Samuel B. Holler, a farmer. W. S. Faris,
the youngest of the family, is a farmer three miles southeast of Kanopolis.
Henry Van Deman Faris was born in Delaware County, Ohio, June 8, 1838, and spent the first
twenty
years of his life on his father's farm, obtaining his education in the rural schools. In
1859, at the age of
twenty-one, he came west and located in Dickinson County, Kansas, which was then on the
far western frontier. In that county he cut and rafted sawlogs down Smoky River to
Junction City and during the winter made shingles. The spring of 1860 found him enrolled
among the pioneer farmers of Dickinson County. He tilled the soil diligently, but that
year was one of general crop failure, and he was reduced to the bottom of his resources.
He started out tramping over the country looking for work, having not a penny of money,
and he walked for many days subsisting as he could on the bounty of strangers. Finally a
man named Gus Packard in Dickinson County gave him employment for a couple of weeks and
paid him $8. For a time he also hunted on the western plains, and in September, 1860,
arrived at Clear Creek in Ellsworth County. Here he took a farm and later pre-empted the
160 acres which was his home and the center of his extended farming activities for over
half a century. He lived on the farm until 1916, and in the meantime had acquired a large
ranch of 640 acres. Selling this farm in 1916, Mr. Faris removed to Kanopolis and bought a
good home on Colorado Avenue, where he is now enjoying the comforts earned by his hard
work and experience of over half a century in Kansas.
There is no more ardent advocate of the principles and policies of the republican party in
Kansas than Mr. Faris. He is likewise an active member of the Presbyterian Church and an
elder at Kanopolis. Mr. Faris married in Henry County, Illinois, in 1871, Miss Emma
Pitezel, daughter of Benjamin W. and Mary (Combs) Pitezel, both now deceased. Her father
was a farmer. Mr. and Mrs. Faris have no children.
Courtesy of Kansas Gen Web |
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