beginning been a leading factor in its management. During his residence in Nevada he has also been prominently connected with the live stock market, purchasing extensively for packing houses at Chicago. In addition to the interests mentioned, he is engaged in farming and is the owner of a well improved place of two hundred and fifty-five acres in Grant township. He is recognized as a progressive man of large enterprise and public spirit, and he has assisted very materially in enhancing the prosperity not only of Story county but of a much wider region in Iowa.
JOHN M. Chrisman.
John M. Chrisman, a son of James A. and Amanda J. (Fairbanks) Chrisman, was born in Bureau county, Illinois, 0n the 16th of February, 1867. The father was a native of Ohio, being born in Highland county, and was a son of George Chrisman, who came to the United States from Germany with his parents when a small boy. The mother was born in Posey county, Indiana, a daughter of Alexander Fairbanks, a cabinet-maker by trade, who was born in Massachusetts and belonged to the Fairbanks family of that state. Mr. and Mrs. Chrisman were married in Bureau county, Illinois, and were the parents of four children, who are as follows : Emma, who became the wife of Joseph Burton of Lincoln, Nebraska; Catherine, the widow of Fred Conover, of Bradford, Illinois; John M., our subject; and William David, of Bradford, Illinois. The father always followed the vocation of farming, in which he was very successful. The parents were members of the Methodist Episcopal church, in which the father was a very active worker until his death in 1899. The mother is still living at an advanced age and makes her home in Bureau county, Illinois.
Mr. Chrisman spent his younger years in a manner very similar to the majority of boys who are reared in the country. He attended the district schools to the age of fifteen years and for three years at Princeton, (Illinois) high school. He also took a course at the university in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he spent three years. At the age of twenty-one years he assumed the entire responsibility and control of the home farm, serving in this capacity for three years. At the expiration of that period he became a landowner, purchasing eighty acres of land in Bureau county, which he operated for nine years. In 1901 he came to Iowa and bought two hundred acres of land on section 32, Richland township, Story county, where he continues to reside. Mr. Chrisman has always made a specialty of feeding and raising cattle and hogs and in this he has met with success and substantial reward. He has very largely confined his efforts in this direction to shorthorn cattle and Poland China hogs.
In 1892 was solemnized the marriage of Mr. Chrisman and Miss Addie Reed, a daughter of Hudson and Sarah (Britton) Reed, the former a native