| 144 cont'd | HISTORY OF ALLEN AND |
GEORGE HARRIS
GEORGE HARRIS, one of the practical and prosperous farmers of Deer Creek township, came to Allen County, Kansas, in company with his fellow countrymen, Busley and Robertshaw, in 1880, and purchased a tract of eighty acres on the broad and untamed prairie in section seventeen, township twenty-four, range twenty. He was a young Englishman with scant means and he came to the State to provide himself, with his labor and his native tenacity, a home for his growing family. He had worked as a farm hand in Livingston County, New York, and, at $25 a month, he had laid by sufficient means to pay for his land and to begin the initial work of its cultivation and improvement. His first cottage, 16x12, furnished him with a home for eight years and in that time his prosperity enabled him to erect a comfortable and more commodious residence, a modest barn, and to add forty acres to his original farm.
Before coming to Kansas Mr. Harris resided in New York seven years, coming there from Lincolnshire, England, where he was born July 31, 1849. His father, Thos. Harris, was a farmer and William and our subject were his only heirs. William Harris resides in England still. Thos. Harris married Susanna Hilton, who, after the death of her husband married
| WOODSON COUNTIES, KANSAS. | 145 |
James Hill and reared a second family of four children. George Harris attended school at Keeby, Lincolnshire. In his youth he learned farming by actual experience and worked, also, in the iron mines.
November 13, 1874, Mr. Harris was married at Rochester, New York, to Elizabeth Lyttle, a daughter of Joseph Lyttle, a settler from the north of Ireland. Mr. and Mrs Harris' children are: Alice, wife of Geo. M. Love, of Kansas City, Missouri; Mary, Clara, Hilton and Nellie.
Mr. Harris became a voter in 1880. He cast his first presidential ballot for the Republican candidate of that year, but four years later he supported Mr. Cleveland. For ten years he has been identified with the Republicans and his support of their candidate in 1896 and in 1900 was both earnest and enthusiastic.
Pages 144-145, transcribed by Carolyn Ward from History of Allen and Woodson Counties, Kansas: embellished with portraits of well known people of these counties, with biographies of our representative citizens, cuts of public buildings and a map of each county / Edited and Compiled by L. Wallace Duncan and Chas. F. Scott. Iola Registers, Printers and Binders, Iola, Kan.: 1901; 894 p., [36] leaves of plates: ill., ports.; includes index.
