Father of the John Glenn Newbill, was born in Franklin county, Virginia, May 17th, 1882. He was married December 1st, 1846, to Nancy A. Johnson, only daughter of James M. and Elizabeth Johnson, and in the following year removed to Southwest Missouri, locating on the farm now owned by Dr. H. H. Lea, in the northeast corner of the territory now known as Webster county. Three years afterward he removed to Greene county, where he purchased the fine farm of Samuel McClelland, two and one-half miles west of Springfield. Here he engaged largely in agriculture and stock-raising, and was one of the foremost men in the county in the importation and breeding, of the different kinds of fine stock. In the spring of 1854 he took a drove of cattle and wagon train across the plains to the Golden State, returning home by way of Panama and New York in the following autumn. As will be seen elsewhere in this work, he was twice elected president of the Southwest District Agricultural and Mechanical Association for the two years prior to the war, at which time that association stood in the front ranks of similar institutions of the kind in the West. He was also prominently connected with the association as a member of the board of directors from its inception up to that time. In the political campaign of 1860 he was a staunch supporter of Douglas, but in the late war he took the side of the Lost Cause. In the early part of the winter of 1860 he went to Bell county, Texas, to close up his stock business there, after which he was never nearer his home in Greene county than when confined for a few weeks as a prisoner of Bewar in the old McDowell college, St. Louis, in the summer of 1863. After his release he again went South to engage in cotton speculation, where it is supposed he lost his life in the month of December, 1864, the date of his last letter to his family, as nothing was ever learned of his whereabouts afterwards. His wife and six children are living, five in Greene and one in Bates county.
