Thomas S. Newland, a Civil war veteran and early settler of Butler county, is a native of Ohio. He was born in Logan county, January 18, 1842, a son of Isaac and Elizabeth (Ross) Newland, natives of Pennsylvania, who were married in that State, and afterward removed to Logan county, where the father died in 1845. The mother and children then returned to Pennsylvania, to her old home in Washington county, and in 1850, the mother and her eight children embarked on an Ohio river boat at Wheeling, W. Va., with Illinois as their destination. Mr. Newland was a boy about nine years old when the family made the trip, and says he remembers that on the voyage up the river from Quincy, Ill., that the Mississippi was filled with floating ice. After a short stay at Quincy, the family removed to Hancock county, Illinois.

When the Civil war broke out, or to be exact, September 1, 1862, Mr. Newland enlisted in Company B, Seventy-eighth regiment, Illinois infantry. His regiment was at first attached to the army of the Cumberland, and later took part in Sherman's march to the sea. Mr. Newland participated in many of the important and hard fought battles of that great conflict. He was at the campaign of Atlanta, and after the fall of that place, he was on the expedition through the Carolinas, when the war ended. He was in the Grand Review at Washington, and afterward was sent to Chicago, Ill., where he was discharged and mustered out of service.

In 1871, he came to Butler county, Kansas, and filed on a claim in Bruno township, where he remained until 1874, when the grasshoppers came and destroyed every green blade of vegetation. Mr. Newland made up his mind that from the general appearance of the country after the devastation of these pests, that it was not a good place to live, and he sold his claim and went to California. After working on a ranch there,

for three years, he went to Skagit County, Washington, on the banks of the Skagit river, where he pre-empted a claim, which he sold in 1885. He returned to Butler county, and has since made his home in Bruno township.

Mr. Newland was married in 1874, to Miss Emma Rison, a native of Kansas, and to this marriage four children were born: C. E., Cold Springs, Okla.; Alice, married David Gorman, Cowley county; W. H., Topeka, and Annie, married Augy Riley, Newkirk, Okla. The mother of these children died in Washington, in the spring of 1885, and the family returned to Kansas in the fallowing fall. In 1892, Mr. Newland married Mrs. Margaret Fitzgerald, a widow. She was a daughter of George Snook, a pioneer of Bruno township.

Mr. Newland is a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, and the Methodist Episcopal church, and has always been a stanch Republican.

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