People, Places and Things: PEOPLE

JOHN R. MULVANE was born in New Comerstown, Tuscarawas County, Ohio, July 6, 1835. He is the eldest son of David and Mary Ross Mulvane. His paternal grandfather, John Mulvane, a Scotch-Irish farmer, emigrated from North Carolina to Ohio, and located near Newcomerstown, sic while the Delaware Indians were still there. He was a soldier of the Republic in the War of 1812. Mary McCune Mulvane, his grandmother, was a daughter of Ensign James McCune, a Scotchman, who also was a soldier in the War of 1812. He received from the government a patent for 112 acres of land, the reward of military service. This farm has remained in the family for three generations, and is now owned by the youngest sister of J. R. Mulvane, who also has the old parchment patent. The maternal grandfather was Rev. William Ross (a native of Cork, Ireland), who was sent from Philadelphia to the wilds of eastern Ohio as a Methodist missionary to the Indians. He lived here over forty years, when he emigrated to Ohio, Bureau County, Illinois. He died at the ripe age of ninety-seven years, having fought the good fight of an earnest disciple of our Lord Jesus. The maternal grandmother, Jane Whitaker Ross, daughter of James Whitaker, of Westchester County, Pennsylvania, is a sister of the Whitakers of Philadelphia; James Whitaker of the old Arkwright Cotton Mills, of the firm of Seifurt, McManus & Company; Joseph, of the Phoenixville Iron Works; and George P., of Principio Furnaces, of Cecil County, Maryland. David Mulvane, his father, was a farmer boy. He worked on the Ohio Canal, handled a wheelbarrow and shovel, and drove an ox team, He was afterward a farmer, merchant and manufacturer, and died January 8, 1877, in his native town at the age of seventy-two, leaving five sons and two daughters. His mother, Mary Ross Mulvane, still lives, hale and hearty, in the little village of New Comerstown. John R. Mulvane, when a boy, learned the tanner's trade in his father's establishment, and in his seventeenth year entered his father's general merchandise store, and followed merchandising in the town of his nativity till 1865, when he located in Princeton, Bureau County, Illinois, and there engaged in merchandising. His health failing, in 1867, he sold out and spent parts of 1867 and 1868 with his wife, also in poor health, at Kenosha Water Cure, Kenosha, Wis. While here he made the acquaintance of Col. G. W. Veale, of Topeka, Kansas, and being pleased with the account he received of this country, came to Topeka, Kansas, in the winter of 1868-69, where he still resides. He is president of the Topeka Bank, and connected with several minor enterprises, as the Missouri & Kansas Telephone Company, Topeka City Railway, etc. With his brothers, Hon. Joab Mulvane and D. A. Mulvane, he is engaged in farming and stock-raising. John R. Mulvane was married to Miss Hattie N. Freeman, a teacher in the schools of New Comerstown, daughter of Rev. E. W. Freeman, a Baptist minister, on July 16, 1857