BENJAMIN COPE.

DOCTOR BENJAMIN COPE is a skilled physician and surgeon of Humboldt, whose ability is widely recognized. His knowledge of the science of medicine is broad and comprehensive, and his successful adaptation of its principles to the needs of suffering humanity has gained him enviable prestige in professional circles. He was born in Columbiana county, Ohio, October 9, 1849, and is a son of Elijah Cope, also a native of the Buckeye state and a farmer by occupation. He married Miss Anna Fryfogle, a native of Maryland, and about 1865 removed with his family to northern Indiana, where he remained for a few years, after which he returned to Ohio, where he resided until his death in 1876, at sixty years of age. His widow still survives him and has attained to the advanced age of eighty-three years. In their family were ten children, but all are now deceased with the exception of the Doctor and David Cope, the latter a resident of Colorado. Two of the sons were soldiers in the Civil war, John W., one of them, enlisting in 1861 as a private of the Forty-third Ohio Volunteers. After the battle of Corinth he was taken ill, died and was buried there. Joshua Cope, the other, enlisted in 1863, was sent to the department of the Cumberland, and participated in the arduous service of the campaign of east Tennessee. The troops had to go on long hard marches and their food supply was short, for as communication with the north was cut off they had to live on what they could forage on an almost exhausted country. Joshua Cope participated in the siege of Knoxville, which lasted twenty-five days and when General Sherman went to the relief of the besieging troops who were under command of General Burnsides, he found that they were almost starved, having nothing to eat except a loaf of bread daily. Joshua Cope returned to his home at the close of the war and soon afterward died from disease resulting from the exposure and hardships of army life.

Dr. Cope acquired his preliminary education in the common schools of Ohio and Indiana and afterward attended college at Mount Union, Ohio.

In 1870 he came to Kansas, locating in Linn county, where he was employed in various ways until his return to Ohio. He then read medicine under Dr. B. A. Whiteleather, at Osnaburg, Stark county, Ohio, and attended a course of lectures at Cleveland. In 1878 he again came to Kansas and was a student in the St. Joseph, Missouri, Northwestern College, winning his diploma in that institution. He began practice in Wilson county and for seventeen years was a leading representative of the medical profession there. On the expiration of that period he came to Humboldt and has since enjoyed a large and constantly increasing patronage in this place.

In the fall of 1878 Dr. Cope returned to Ohio and married Miss Ella Pettit at New Lisbon. She is a native of the Buckeye state, and by her marriage has become the mother of five children, namely: Edna, Florence, Elsie, Frances and Byron. The Doctor owes his success in life entirely to his own efforts. He scorned no service that would yield to him an honorable living and thus prepared for professional life in which he has obtained an enviable degree of success.

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