Louis Adelbert Champlin

LOUIS ADELBERT CHAMPLIN has been a resident of Kansas nearly forty years, and most of that time has been spent in and around Phillipsburg, where he is known as one of the extensive farmers and land owners, a thorough business man, and as a citizen who has been identified with much of the public life of his home city.

Mr. Champlin was born in Allegany County, New York, November 6, 1858. His grandfather, William H. Champlin, was a native of Rhode Island and one of the early settlers in Allegany County, New York, where he cleared away the forest which at one time covered his farm. He died there in middle life. His wife was Sarah Saunders, a native of Rhode Island, who lived to advanced years and died in Allegany County. The Champlins came originally from England.

William H. Champlin, father of the Phillipsburg business man, was born in Allegany County, New York, was a farmer, and in 1861 volunteered his services in Company E of the Eighty-fifth New York Infantry. He was captured, sent to the notorious Andersonville prison, and there suffered such extremities of hunger and hardships that he became one of the victims of that historic stockade and died August 5, 1863. In politics he was a republican. He married Hannah Kenyon, who was born in Rhode Island in 1824 and died in Allegany County, New York, in June, 1917, at the age of ninety-three. She spent her last years on the old home farm there and had been brought to Allegany County when an infant by her parents. Her children were four in number: Vinnie, who is unmarried and still lives on the old homestead in Allegany County; W. H., who came to Kansas in 1875, located on a farm at Nortonville, and in 1891, while on a trip to Lenora, accidentally shot himself and died in Lenora; Louis A., the third in age; and Louise, who resides at Ithaca, New York, widow of Joseph Price, who before his death was a merchant at Friendship, New York.

Louis A. Champlin attended the public schools of Allegany County, New York, and was only five years of age when his father died. He attended the high school at Alfred Center and lived with his mother on the home farm to the age of fourteen. His life has been a succession of efforts for his own advancement, beginning as a farm hand in the summer months and attending school in winter. He finished his schooling at the age of eighteen and worked steadily on the farm for two years. Finally he bought a place in Allegany County and cultivated it two years.

In 1880 Mr. Champlin came to Jackson County, Kansas, and was a farmer and stock raiser in that community until 1884, when he moved to Phillipsburg. Here his activities have been varied. For twenty-five years he was a leading stock buyer and feeder, for ten years was in the grain business, owning an elevator and operating a grist mill, and for ten years and up to March, 1917, was a local merchant. His principal interests at the present time are farming and stock raising. His chief farm comprises 640 acres north of Phillipsburg, and he also owns 320 acres in Gove County. He is a director in the Capital Live Stock Insurance Company at Topeka, and, for a number of years was a director of the Farmers National Bank of Phillipsburg.

For five years Mr. Champlin was honored with the office of mayor of Phillipsburg. He is a republican and is affiliated with Phillipsburg Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. In 1878, in Allegany County, New York, he married Miss Ida Sparks, a native of Pennsylvania. They had four children: Ethel, who died at the age of eighteen years; Floyd A., who died at the age of twenty-seven; W. H., who died in 1918, as a merchant in Montana; and Louise, wife of John Murphy, a resident of Denver, Colorado.