Arthur S. Farmer

ARTHUR S. FARMER since leaving school has been identified with mercantile affairs, is a man of wide and thorough experience in that line, and was the founder and has for a number of years been the capable manager of the W. E. Jett Mercantile Company in their large department store at Pratt.

Mr. Farmer was born in Callaway County, Missouri, January 1, 1878. He is of English and Scotch ancestry. His grandfather, Joseph Farmer, was a native of Kentucky and spent his active life and died as a farmer in Callaway County, Missouri. W. R. Farmer, father of the Pratt merchant, was born in Callaway County in 1838, and lived there all his life as a farmer, dying in 1887. He was a Confederate soldier and was in the ranks of the army during the last year of the war. He was a democrat, a member of the Masonic fraternity, and was very deeply interested in the Baptist Church and one of its most regular and consistent members. He married Alice Kemper, who was born in Bates County, Missouri, in 1855, and is now living with her oldest son, Arthur, at Pratt. L. D. Farmer is manager of the W. E. Jett Mercantile Company's store at Blackwell, Oklahoma. W. R. Farmer and C. W. Farmer are agriculturists at Tyrone, Oklahoma. J. E. Farmer is manager of the W. E. Jett Mercantile Company at Anthony, Kansas.

Arthur S. Farmer attended the rural schools of Callaway County, and was also a student in Westminister College at Fulton, Missouri. In 1901 he took a course in the Barnes Business College in St. Louis, and the next two years he was manager of a store in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. In 1904 he joined the W. E. Jett Mercantile Company at Kingman, and was manager of the dry goods department until 1906. The company sent him to Pratt to establish a new department store, and since it was organized and opened for business he has been its active manager. This is one of the leading stores of the kind in Western Kansas. The W. E. Jett Mercantile Company owns and operates four stores in Kansas and Oklahoma, located at Kingman, Pratt and Anthony, Kansas, and Blackwell, Oklahoma, and as above noted, three of the Farmer brothers are among their managers. Mr. Farmer is also a director of the Johnson-Larimer Dry Goods Company at Wichita and a director of the Citizens State Bank of Pratt. He owns a farm of 160 acres in Colorado.

In politics he is a democrat, and he is a member and steward of the Methodist Episcopal Church and is affiliated with Kilwinning Lodge of Masons at Pratt, Pratt Chapter, Royal Arch Masons, Pratt Consistory, Knights Templar, Wichita Consistory No. 2 of the Scottish Rite, and Wichita Temple of the Mystic Shrine. He also belongs to Pratt Lodge of Odd Fellows.

In 1904, at Deepwater, Missouri, Mr. Farmer married Miss Ida Griffith, daughter of Wesley and Sarah (Kirk) Griffith, the latter still living at Clinton, Missouri. Her deceased father was a farmer, banker and cattleman. Mr. and Mrs. Farmer have four children: Donald, born in 1907; Lawrence, born in 1911; Richard, born in 1914, and Robert, born in 1918.

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