1905 History of Crawford County Kansas

Alonzo L. Cory, of Lincoln township, with postoffice at Girard, came to Crawford county in 1878, just when it was beginning its period of most rapid development, and he has since lived here and become a successful farmer and also taken an active part in the affairs of his community and county. He is a man of many resources, is practical and able, and has prospered in all his undertakings. He came to this county from Syracuse, Kosciusko county, Indiana, where he was born February 7, 1845.

At the age of eighteen he became a soldier in the service of his country, and before reaching maturity he had twice been a soldier in the greatest war of his country. He first enlisted in February, 1863, in Company G, One Hundred and Eighteenth Indiana Infantry, and from the camp at Indianapolis was sent into the Virginias and Carolinas, and his service also took him into Maryland and Pennsylvania after General Longstreet's rebel forces. He was in the engagements at Strawberry Plains, Walkers Ford, the Cumberland Gap, and for nine months on the campaign in the James valley. He was honorably discharged from the service, but in January, 1865, he again enlisted in Company A, One Hundred and Fifty-second Indiana, along with his half-brother A. J. Cory, and served until the close of hostilities, when he was honorably discharged and came home a veteran.

Mr. Cory was the youngest child of Abijah C. and Sally (Mann) Cory. His grandfather, Jeremiah Cory, was a native of Pennsylvania, of Scotch ancestry, and, was a soldier in the war of 1812. He married Dorothy Martin, and they moved to Indiana among the early settlers in 1834, and thence moved to Story county, Iowa, where they both died. Abijah C. Cory married for his first wife Sally Mann, who died in 1845, soon after the birth of Alonzo, and leaving two other children, Samantha, who died at the age of fourteen years, and Almeda. After the death of his first wife Abijah C. Cory married Mrs. Matilda (Wood) Gunter, a daughter of John G. Wood, a soldier of the war of 1812, and by this marriage there were the following children: A. J., Jesse, M. Malinda, P. Celestine, and Elizabeth. The father, who died at Syracuse, Indiana, at the age of seventy-five, was a successful farmer and stockman, politically was a Whig and Republican, active in party affairs though never seeking office, and was a member of the Baptist church.

Mr. Cory grew up on the old farm in Indiana, where he was taught to work as well as learning the lessons of the public schools. Possessed of much mechanical ingenuity and practical ability, he took up the occupations of carpenter and mechanical engineer, and followed that line for some years. He was a very young man when he gave hostages to fortune by getting married, for on the day before Christmas, 1865, he was married, in Kosciusko county, to Miss Rebecca Kauffman, and they have spent a most happy married life of nearly forty years. She spent the first nine years of her life in Pennsylvania, and then came to Indiana, where she grew up and received her education. She was a daughter of Joseph and Mary (Fry) Kauffman, who both passed away in Kosciusko County.

In 1878 Mr. Cory came to this county and bought a hundred and sixty acres in Lincoln township, where he has made one of the choice farmsteads of the county, well improved with comfortable and ample house and barn, with a nice orchard set out since he came here, and with fields cultivated in modern and most productive methods. Comfort and hospitality go hand in hand with enterprise and able management at the Cory home, and its members are numbered among the substantial and popular people of the township.

Mr. and Mrs. Cory have four children: Professor Elmer Ellsworth, who is principal of the schools at Pleasant Valley, Colorado; Lynn A., who, like his father, is a fine mechanic and is a prosperous carpenter and contractor of Lincoln township; Jesse F., who is clerking in a mercantile store; and Essie Dale, married and living at Englevale. Mr. Cory is a stanch Republican, and he and his wife are members of the Church of God.