Joshua Wheeler was born in Buckingham, England, February 12, 1827, and came to America in 1844, locating in New Jersey, where he resided four years before removing to Illinois. In 1857 a colony of seven or eight families of Fulton county, Illinois, farmers, Seventh-Day Baptists, came to Kansas, and located in the southwest portion of Atchison county, covering the entire distance overland. S. P. Griffin and Dennis Sounders preceded the colony in the spring of the same year to look up a location. They went as far to the southwest as Emporia, but found no land equal to that of Atchison county. After locating the land for the colony they went back to Illinois, but did not accompany the colony to Kansas, but came a year or two later. Griffin farmed for nearly twenty years, but afterwards became a Nortonville merchant. He was the father of Charles T. Griffin, at one time an attorney in Atchison. When the colony of Seventh-Day people arrived at the end of their destination they found the land in possession of colonists, but they bought them out, preëmpted claims and laid out the now famous Seventh- Day Lane. The land was then an open prairie, occupied only by an occasional hut. It is at this time the admiration of every visitor abounding in well cultivated fields, pastures, groves, orchards, comfortable homes, to which paint is no stranger, large barns, uniformly trimmed hedges, and peopled by as thrifty a class as can be found in the western country. Later on Seventh-Day people came from Iowa, Wisconsin and New York, and joined the Illinois colony on Seventh-Day Lane, which is two miles in length. The Seventh-Day Baptists observe their Sabbath from sundown Friday evening to sundown Saturday evening. Their church has a seating capacity of 400, which is always comfortably filled, and was built in 1884, prior to which time the Seventh-Day Baptists worshiped in their school house. A. A. Randolph was the first pastor of the church on Seventh-Day Lane. He came here from Pennsylvania in 1863, and died in 1868. S. R. Wheeler, a brother of Joshua Wheeler, was pastor of the church for twelve years. When the Seventh-Day Baptists built their homes on the Lane smooth wire cost eleven and one-half cents per pound in Atchison, and ordinary flooring, $100.00 per thousand feet. Money was loaned at four per cent. per month. They did all of their trading in Atchison until Nortonville was built. Joshua Wheeler was not only a successful farmer, but a good business man. He kept a regular set of books, and could always tell exactly what it cost him to produce a bushel of wheat in any of the different years of his farm experience. He could tell also what a bushel of corn, fed to cattle, would produce. In 1877 he sold his wheat for $1.75 per bushel. He owned a farm of over 300 acres, just at the west end of the Lane, where he died on the fourteenth day of May, 1896. WILLIAM HETHERINGTON.