Benest

Irvin F. Benest. The Benest family came to Kansas in 1871. Two years later came the great financial panic following the failure of Jay Cooke on the famous Black Friday. It was an era of wide spread distress, but Kansas people during those years had even more grievous burdens than hard times. The grasshoppers came as a plague, there were successive seasons of drouth, crops were a rarity, and there was little market for what the farmers did produce. It was during the height of the hard times of that decade that Irvin F. Benest, a lawyer and president of … Read more