Carlton M. Lounsbury has played a very effective and successful role in Kansas affairs for over fortyfive years and now, at the age of seventy-one, a young old man, is enjoying comfortable retirement at the city of Lincoln.
Mr. Lounsbury is of an English family. It was his grandfather who came from England and first settled in Canada. Carlton M. Lounsbury’s father Rudolphus Lounsbury, was born in Canada in 1797, but when a young man came to the United States and settled in Western New York, in what was known as the “Holland Purchase.” He followed the vocation of agriculture and spent his active life largely in the Town of Bethany in Genesee County, where he died in 1870. He was a whig in politics, later afflliating with the republicans, and was an active member of the Free Will Baptist Church. He married Almira Brown, who was born in New York State in 1810 and died there in 1866. There were three children; Earl Byron, a graduate of Buffalo Medical College and a successful physician and surgeon until his death at Rochester in 1880; James A., also a graduate of Buffalo Medical College, practiced medicine for a number of years, but is now president of the Farmers State Bank at Barnard, Kansas, and his career is noted on other pages; Carlton M., the youngest of the three. The father by a second marrlage to Lorinda Odin had two children, Lula and William.
Carlton M. Lounsbury was born at Bethany, Genesee County, New York, July 6, 1846. He received advantages above the ordinary as a youth, attending the common schools of his native ‘town and also the Genesee and Wyoming Seminary at Alexander, New York.
Mr. Lounsbury was a young man of twenty-four, eager for adventure and achievement, when he came to Kansas in 1870. Here he took up a homestead in Cedron Township of Lincoln County, and also filed on a timber claim of 160 acres. He proved up both claims, and still owned the original homestead. Farming and farm management proved a role in which his energies had very successful results, and in the conrse of time he gathered together 720 acres, all of which he still owned and it is all improved by farming. During his active career Mr. Lounsbury did diversifled farming on a large scale. These lands are now rented out and since 1911 he had lived retired in Lincoln. From his farm Mr. Lounsbury conducted a country store for thirty years, and supplied all the commodities needed in his community. Besides farming he engaged in banking and for a number of years was president of the Farmers State Bank at Lucas, Kansas, and is still a director of the Farmers National Bank at Lincoln.
In matters of politics Mr. Lounsbury is identified with the republican party. He is a member and trustee of the Presbyterian Church and is affiliated with Lincoln Lodge No. 154, Anclent Free and Accepted Masons.
In 1884, some years after he had come to Kansas and had developed his homestead into a farm, Mr. Lounsbury married in this county, in Cedron Township, Miss Mary C. Yarnell, daughter of Ithmer and Jane Yarnell. Both her parents are doceased, her father having been a Kansas farmer. Mr. and Mrs. Lounsbury have had two children: William A, and Howard M. William A. diod at the age of four years. Howard M. was born June 25, 1899, graduated from the Lincoln High School in 1917 and is now a student in Emporia College, a Presbyterian institution.