FRANCIS MARION CONLEY     GRAVESTONE PHOTO                      

The La Cygne Weekly Journal, Friday, June 28, 1907, Pg 5

In Memoriam.

  Francis Marion Conley was born in Indiana March 28, 1840 and departed this life at his home in La Cygne, Kansas June 25, 1907, aged 67 years, 2 months and 27 days.  On the 15th day of May 1862 in the bonds of Holy Matrimony to Miss Vienna Mason.  To this union was born ten children, three of whom with the wife survive him and mourn his departure to the Spirit World.

  On August 18, 1862, just sixty three days after their wedding day, Mr. Conley in response to his country’s call for brave men offered himself as a volunteer and was accepted and enlisted in Company E of the 12 Kansas Infantry, and served his country almost three years, receiving a honorable discharge at Little Rock June 13, 1865.

  After the close of the war he returned to his Kansas home where by honesty, industry and good management he has acquired some very desirable property.  For the last fifteen years he has been identified with the business interests of La Cygne, conducting very successfully a furniture store.  He also held many city and county offices proving himself worthy of the confidence placed in him by his fellowmen.  But it was in his judicial administration that he out-shown all his other gifts.  He seemed especially qualified for that special work, hence he was commonly spoke of as “Judge”.  His apprehensions were very rapid; his development of truth was luminous as its path; his knowledge appeared intuitive, and he, by a single glance, and with as much facility as the eye of the eagle passing over the landscape, surveyed the whole field on controversy—saw in what way the truth might be most successfully defended and how error must be approached.  In coming into his presence where he sat as the Judge, oppressed humanity felt a secret rapture, and the heart of the innocent leaped for joy.

  Wherever he was—it mattered not in that sphere he moved—the friendless had a friend, the fatherless had a father, the poor man though unable to reward his kindness, found an advocate.  It was when the rich oppressed the poor—when the powerful menaced the defenseless, when truth was disregarded or the eternal principles of Justice violated it was on these occasions that he exercised all his strength, and gave him the force and authority of a prophet.

  As a patriot, his integrity blessed the scrutiny of inquisition; whose manly virtue never shaped itself to circumstances; who stood amid the varying tides of party, firm like the rock which far from land lifts its majestic top above the waves and remains unshaken by the storms which agitate the ocean.

  As a friend, he was true to his promise, his bosom was transparent and deep in the bottom of his heart was rooted every tender and sympathetic virtue.  He made it a rule of his life to be upright, clean and pure in all his transactions with his fellowmen.

  He has spent more than thirty years in the Church of God.  And few men have exercised greater faith in God than did Mr. Conley.  He took God at his word and expected the fulfillment of that word.  He was not disappointed.  Now his illuminated spirit still whispers from heaven with well known eloquence the solemn admonition, “Mortals hastening to the tomb and once the companions of my pilgrimage, take warning, and avoid my errors.  Cultivate the virtues I have recommended.  Follow the God I have followed.  Live for immortality; and would you recite anything from the final dissolution lay it up with God.  Thus speaks, me thinks our deceased benefactor.  For thus he acted during life.  And this more than any other sheds glory on his character.  Everything else death effaces.  Religion alone abided with him in his