During the midsummer of 1854, James Lynn and William Lynn started across the prairies from Westport, Missouri, to find homes in Kansas. With a stalwart pair of oxen yoked to a heavy wagon they proceeded slowly but surely westward, and finally, following up the Wakarusa Valley and out along one of its tributaries, they camped one night after a blistering hot August day near a spring that flowed from among a pile of stones and boulders that had been deposited at that point in great abundance by some glacier that must have covered this part of Kansas centuries ago. The flowing spring reminded them of Kentucky, and they concluded that then and there one of them had found a home. James Lynn drove his stake into the ground and said that it was his. Afterwards they traveled further up the little stream and located another claim, and William Lynn marked it and claimed it for his own. The location of these two settlements caused the little stream to be named Lynn Creek, and so it is known from the hills among which it rises on through Berryton, Tevis, and into Wakarusa near Richland. The hardships of pioneer life were too much for James Lynn, and he died within a few years after their settlement; but William Lynn weathered the storm and lived upon the land thus picked out by him on that August day until his death, which occurred in February, 1908. At the time of his death he had lived in Kansas nearly fifty-four years, and he was then one hundred and two years old. When it was found that he was dead, one of his sons called one of the Newcomer boys, who then lived in Topeka, over the phone and said: "Pap is dead. You know he never was much as to churches, and we just thought that we would ask you to come out and say something at his funeral." And, of course, the Newcomer boy said that he would; and on the day appointed he drove out to the old Lynn home, and among the neighbors and friends gathered around he stood by the coffin of this old-timer and looked down upon his face, which resembled a hickory nut worn and preserved with age, and in part he said: "One October day in about the year 1837, in Madison County, Kentucky, a small boy, the oldest son of a widowed mother, had set himself to work trying to split clapboards to make a shelter for some stock that belonged to his mother. He was working hard and making slow progress, when a stalwart young man came along on his way to his own duties of the day. The young man stopped, spoke kindly to him, and commenced helping with the work. What had promised to be a day of toil became a day of pleasure, and when the sun sank low in the west on that day, the boards had been made and the shelter erected, and the boy and man were happy--the one scarcely more happy than the other. That boy was my father; and that young man, who was his friend from the beginning, was none other than the grand old man whose lifeless body lies before us today.