John Taggart, one of the prominent financiers of White City, Kan., was born Nov. 27, 1839, in the parish of Bride, Isle of Man, the first son of Paul and Elizabeth (Wylchrust) Taggart. The father was born at the same place, Feb. 12, 1812. He was a minister of the Methodist church and also followed agricultural pursuits. The mother was also born on the Isle of Man and died at Atchison, Kan., in August, 1879. There were six children in the Taggart family, four boys and two girls. John Taggart's brothers were: Thomas A., an Episcopal minister, ordained by Bishop Vail in Topeka, Kan., and assigned to a parish in England; H. S., now a retired merchant at Long Branch, Cal.; and James, a merchant who has retired from active life and lives in Denver, Col. John attended the parish schools of the Isle of Man, and being the oldest of a large family had to work on the farm. When twenty-seven years of age he immigrated to America, at that time the land of opportunity for a young man, and located at Atchison, Kan. He spent his first winter in the West in logging and clearing land east of the Missouri river, near Atchison, then he rented land and farmed for six years. His family came from England about that time and he bought 200 acres of school land near Pardee, Atchison county, where he lived until 1870. That year he moved into the town of Pardee and opened a general mercantile store, which he conducted for two years. When the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad was built from Atchison to Topeka, Mr. Taggart negotiated with the road for 160 acres of land, on which he laid out the town of Nortonville. He became the first postmaster and express agent of that town and its first merchant. He remained there from 1873 to 1886 and then came to White City, where he organized the White City State Bank and served as its cashier for thirteen years. In 1899 he resigned that position and began to deal in land on a large scale, and now owns more than 1,000 acres of the most valuable farming land near White City. He has been mayor of the town three terms and is active in all civic improvements, as well as director of the telephone company.

Nov. 4, 1869, Mr. Taggart married Euphemia A., a daughter of Samuel and Sarah Cummings, the first to settle with his family in Atchison county in 1855. They are now dead. To this union six children were born: Herbert S., deceased; George H., deceased; and Dora Belle, the wife of Rev. William A. Brown, superintendent of missions for international Sunday schools, who lives at Evanston, Ill. Both Mr. and Mrs. Brown are graduates of Baker University, Baldwin, Kan. Mr. Brown was pastor of Tower Grove Methodist Church, at St. Louis, and then assigned to the English speaking Methodist church in Manila, P. I., but resigned on account of ill health. He was assigned to the Washington Avenue Church at Kansas City soon after returning to the United States; two years later he went to New York to become the secretary of the Young People's Missionary Movement, and in 1910 was assigned to a position which he now holds, with office in Chicago, Ill. The fourth child in the Taggart family was Gussie M., the wife of Scott E. W. Bedford, professor of sociology and history in Miami University, at Oxford, Ohio, and at this writing (1911) has been elected to succeed Dr. Vincent in the University of Chicago. She attended Baker University four years, then graduated from the Chicago Conservatory of Music. Paul, the fifth child, was born May 18, 1884; he was educated in the public schools and at the age of twenty became a bookkeeper in a Kansas City bank, where he remained two years. Subsequently he was a bookkeeper for a firm in Chicago, but came back to Kansas to become a partner of his father in real estate business. In 1908, in the company of his parents, he visited the Isle of Man, where he met Mary Deans Quarrie, and returned to England in 1909 and married her. Lucile E., the youngest child in the family, was born Jan. 10, 1889, and died in July, 1892. Mr. Taggart has been superintendent of the Methodist Sunday school for forty-eight years and is now trustee and steward of the Methodist church of White City.