| 248 cont'd | HISTORY OF ALLEN AND |
JOHN WESLEY LAURY.
JOHN WESLEY LAURY, Marmaton township's successful farmer and popular citizen, was born in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, February 2, 1853. Godfrey Laury, his father, was born in Lehigh County, in 1823, and was a Pennsylvania Dutchman. His early life was passed as a merchant at Mahanoy in Schuylkill County, but the last twenty years of his life were spent with our subject on the farm. John Laury, our subject's grandfather, was one of the successful farmers of Lehigh and Northampton Counties, Pennsylvania, in the former of which he died in 1832. His son, Godfrey, served under General Aibright in the defense of Washington when the Rebels were marching on the capital in the summer of 1863.
Godfrey Laury married Anna Maria Dreisbach, a daughter of Daniel Dreisbach, a Carbon County Pennsylvania farmer. Mrs. Laury died in Allen County, Kansas, in 1866, at the age of sixty-three years; while her husband died March 29, 1897. Their children are: John W., our subject; Emma, wife of Theodore Maxson, of Elm township, and Ella, who married J. O. Eagle, of Allen County.
The Laurys came to Kansas in 1878 and settled upon section 9, town 26, range 20, which our subject has succeeded in reducing to a productive farm and a comfortable home. A few years after his advent to the county he discovered an opening in his community for a country butcher and he fitted out a store-on-wheels and engaged in the business. Fourteen years is almost a generation but it is that long since this venture was undertaken and its success has been ample and more than its projector anticipated.
May 18, 1882, John W. Laury was married to Alice McCray, of Wilson County, Kansas, a daughter of William McCray who came to Kansas from Hancock County, Indiana. Mr. and Mrs. Laury's children are: William G., Charles McCray, Clara Olivia, John W. Jr., Emma Alice, George Aldridge, Raymond H., Everett M., and Ruth Jane.
With nothing has John Laury been more familiar and taken a deeper interest in Allen County, than its politics. The time was not when he was not a Republican. He inherited the spirit from his ancestors, breathed it from the air in which he was reared and practiced it from the time he reached his majority. He cast his first Presidential vote for Rutherford B. Hays and he has felt it a great privilege to be permitted to aid in choosing for the
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Presidency such men as Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley. Mr. Laury's convention record, as a delegate, is a long and almost unbroken one. His influence is of far-reaching and weighty character and the candidate whose cause he espouses finds him enlisted for the war. He has been urged for the County Treasurership, which office he is admirably adapted to preside over, but the opportunity has not yet arrived. Were all the elements of our composite citizenship as industrious, as energetic, as honest and as patriotic as John W. Laury there would be no need of court or juries or lawyers.
Pages 248-249, 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.
