Harry McGuire

HARRY McGUIRE, who taught his first term of school in Barber County twenty years ago, has had a long and successful experience as an educator and is now superintendent of the city schools of Kiowa.

He has spent nearly all his life in Kansas but was born in Washington County, Iowa, February 19, 1880. His father, James Madison McGuire, was born in the same Iowa county in 1856, was reared and married there and has followed farming as his life occupation. On moving to Kansas in 1883 he homesteaded a quarter section near Sharon. While he sold the homestead a number of years ago he still owns 960 acres and is one of the leading farmers in the vicinity of Sharon. He began voting as a republican but became a democrat later and is a member of the Church of God. He married Anna Elizabeth McCreedy, born in Illinois in 1861, and Harry MeGuire is the eldest of their children; A. D. McGuire, the second, is an Oklahoma farmer; Sadie Belle died in 1894 and Lola Mary is also deceased; Jennie Augusta is the wife of John Wilson, a farmer in Oregon; Cynthia Ellen married R. S. Orr, a farmer at Colona, Colorado; Charles W. McGuire is a farmer in Oklahoma, and Joseph A. is likewise identified with the agricultural interests of that state; Amos M., the youngest, is a student in the Kiowa High School.

The grandfather of James McGuire was Josiah McGuire, who married Sarah McManus. The father was Michael, the fourth son, who married Lucinda Edwards. Michael was born at Sweetwater, Tennessee, September 4, 1824, and died at Sharon, Kansas, August 2, 1905. The McGuires have nearly all been farmers but all are more or less good mechanics. The grandfather was a wagon maker, and Michael McGuire made the first wagon in Iowa County. He moved to Iowa in the early '40s, homesteaded a claim and raised a large family. He was a pioneer. After his first wife died he came to Barber County, Kansas, in the early '80s and went into the cattle business. This was his second trial at the task of being a pioneer.

Harry McGuire attended the rural schools of Barber County and in 1906 received a teacher's life certificate from the State Normal School of Emporia and in 1919 the same institution awarded him the degree Bachelor of Science. As above noted, he taught a rural school in Barber County in 1899, and was again a teacher in that county in 1901. In 1906 he began a two year term as a teacher in the Norton County High School. From 1908 to 1916 he was superintendent of schools at Valley Falls, and in the latter year accepted his present responsibilities as superintendent of schools at Kiowa. He has the supervision of the grade schools and the junior and senior high schools, with a corps of fifteen teachers and an enrollment of 540. Mr. McGuire is interested in all educational matters, is a member of the County and State Teachers' associations and the National Education Association. He is assistant superintendent of the Sunday school in the Congregational Church and a member of the church choir. In politics he is a democrat, and is affiliated with Cosmos Lodge No. 261, Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, at Kiowa, and he owns his home at Kiowa.

June 12, 1906, Mr. McGuire married at Ringwood, Oklahoma, Miss Frances Van Cleave Morris. Her father, J. P. Morris, of Liberal, Kansas, came to this state in the early '80s, locating in Pratt County, was a contractor and builder, and has lived at Liberal for twenty years or more. J. P. Morris married Anna Putman, a native of Iowa, who died in Pratt County. Mr. and Mrs. McGuire are the parents of four children: Florence Elizabeth, born June 2, 1907; James Claudius, born March 1, 1909; Mildred Irene, born May 16, 1912; and Doris Genevieve, born March 2, 1916.

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