While now a well known figure in the public life of Sedgwick County as county treasurer, Samuel L. Nolan during nearly forty years of residence in the county had rendered his chief service as a business man. He had been a merchant, banker and manufacturer and is one of the big men in his section of the state.
He was born at Lafayette, Indiana, March 7, 1862. In 1877, when he was fifteen years of age, his parents moved to Kansas, arriving at Wichita on the 17th of March in the same year. In the meantime he had attended school back in Indiana, and completed his education at Wichita.
In 1884, at the age of twenty-two, Mr. Nolan embarked in merchandising at Goddard, and that had been his home town ever since. While still a merchant he organized the Goddard State Bank, and as its president had made that a strong and reliable institution in his part of the county. He also owned a large stock and grain farm near Goddard.
Mr. Nolan was one of the promoters of the Central State First Insurance Company of Wichita, of Wichita, of which he is vice president. Only recently he took the lead in organizing the Perfection Broom Corn Harvester Company of Wichita. This company was established to make a machine which cuts, threshes and sorts the brush ready for market. This company is capitalized at $500,000.
Early in his career Mr. Nolan was honored with the office of township treasurer of Attica Township. Since then he had held a number of town and township offices, and in November, 1913, was elected county treasurer of Sedgwick County. He is now filling the second term.
In 1886 Mr. Nolan married Daisy Belle White. She died in 1911 at the age of forty-eight, leaving a son Charles, who is now a successful farmer in Stevens County, Kansas.