Elmer Findlay Bagley, though a resident of Topeka but ten years, has rapidly forged to the front as one of that city's most progressive and successful young business men. He is president of the Elmer F. Bagley Company, of Topeka, an incorporated company, the chief business of which is the buying and selling of unimproved lands in the states of Kansas and Texas, but the company also deals in bonds and mortgages.

Elmer F. Bagley was born on a farm near Atlantic, Cass county, Iowa, Oct. 25, 1874, and is a son of William Findlay Bagley, a native of Muscatine county, Iowa, where he was born in 1848, to William A. and Mary (Burgen) Bagley, the former also a native of Iowa, to which state his father had removed from Ohio in a very early day. William A. Bagley is now a resident of Atlantic, Iowa, and is ninety-four years old. Susanna Spence, the mother of Elmer F. Bagley, was born in Muscatine county, Iowa, Sept. 17, 1855, and is a daughter of John J. Spence, who had removed to Iowa from Lancaster county, Pennsylvania.

When Elmer F. Bagle was a lad ten years old his parents removed from the farm to Atlantic, Iowa, where his youth was spent, and where he graduated in the Atlantic High School, at the age of nineteen. He subsequently graduated at a business college in Atlantic and still later, or in 1895, he completed a course in stenography and advanced bookkeeping in a business college at Des Moines, Iowa. He then returned to Atlantic, where he entered the employ of a large wholesale and retail lumber firm, with which he continued five years, employed first as a bookkeeper and later as a traveling auditor. In 1900 this firm disposed of its business and Mr. Bagley then came to Topeka, where he has since resided. In April, 1900, shortly after he came to Topeka, he organized the Grain Growers Hail Insurance Company, a corporation which insures the farmers' growing crops against destructive hail storms, and has been secretary and treasurer of this company ever since its organization. In the same year he organized a company under the name of Elmer F. Bagley & Company, which was incorporated on April 1, 1910, as the Elmer F. Bagley Company, and he was made its president. In all of his business ventures since he came to Topeka he has had his father, William F. Bagley, for a business associate, the latter being president of the Grain Growers Hail Insurance Company, and secretary of the Elmer F. Bagley Company.

Mr. Bagley was married July 25, 1906, to Miss Grace Lyman, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They have one son, William Howard, born Dec. 21, 1908. In his political views Mr. Bagley is a Republican. He is a member of the Young Men's Christian Association, the Commercial Club, and the Knights of Pythias.