Alfred Blaker, of Pleasanton, Kan., vice-president of the Blaker Milling Company and the Blaker Lumber & Grain Company, was born March 24, 1847, in Bucks county, Pennsylvania, a son of Joshua C. and Ann (Croasdale) Blaker. More extended mention of these parents and of the Blaker ancestry will be found in the sketch of Benjamin F. Blaker, which appears elsewhere in this volume. Mr. Blaker received his education in the public schools near his Pennsylvania home and in the Millersville normal. He taught school one year and served as teller in the First National Bank of Newton, Pa., prior to joining his brother, Benjamin F., in Pleasanton, Kan., in the spring of 1871. There they together engaged in the business with which they have since been identified. Alfred Blaker had charge of a branch of the business at Kansas City for seven years and resided in Lawrence for one year to avail his children of the opportunity for a university education. Since then he has resided in Pleasanton. On Oct. 21, 1869, Mr. Blaker was united in marriage to Miss Anna P. Hibbs, of Bucks county, Pennsylvania, a daughter of Samuel H. Hibbs, who removed from Pennsylvania to Pleasanton and resided there until his death. Mr. and Mrs. Blaker have three children, viz: Prof. Ernest Blaker, a member of the faculty of Cornell University, one of the greatest educational institutions in the United States; Eleanor, now the wife of Rev. H. J. Withington, Presbyterian minister at Pleasanton, Kan.; and William W. Blaker, who resides at Pleasanton.

Mr. Blaker has ably assisted his brother in building up and in managing the extensive business of both the lumber and grain company and the milling company. The former has a lumber yard at each of the eight points where they have grain elevators, and their mill at Pleasanton is the largest in Linn county, or in that section of the state. Mr. Blaker has gained prominence in public affairs as well as in business. He is a Republican in politics, served as a member of the state legislature from 1884 to 1888, and has also served as mayor of Pleasanton. Fraternally he holds a prominent place in the ranks of the Masonic order being a Knight Templar, a Thirty-second degree Scottish Rite Mason and a Noble of the Mystic Shrine. In church faith he is a Presbyterian and is a member of that denomination in Pleasanton. He has been a Kansan for forty years and has been an active participant as well as an interested spectator of the charges that have occurred in this state in that period. The faith in its future which induced him and his brother when young men to cast their fortunes with the new, untried state, has been fully verified in the splendid development and standing which Kansas has attained in its commercial prestige and its forward march and progress toward more ideal civic conditions. Pleasanton numbers Alfred Blaker among its most prominent and respected citizens.