One of the successful farmers of Grant township is Carl Hitchcox, son of William Hitchcox of the preceding sketch. He came to Kansas with his parents and with them settled on the farm just east of Jamestown. He was born in Cass county, Michigan, in 1864. Cass county is in the extreme southern part of the state and the farm where our subject was reared is near the city of Elkhart, Indiana. He attended the common schools of that vicinity, but, not having attained his majority when he emigrated to Kansas, he became a pupil in the Jamestown schools. He has always been a farmer; one of the practical kind that makes farming a successful and profitable industry. He began by renting land of his father and gained rapidly until two years later he had at one time three farms rented.

In the autumn of 1891, he bought two hundred acres of state land, two miles northeast of Jamestown, then owned by Laban Lockard. A small granary and stable with one hundred acres of ground under cultivation, constituted the improvements. Mr. Hitchcox steadily gained until he now owns a half section of land. Seven years ago he built a handsome cottage of eight rooms; prior to this he had provided for his horses a substantial barn.

Mr. Hitchcox made his start and acquired the bulk of his property through raising wheat, but as a sort of side issue he transacts a mule business. Buying the animals when about two years old, he raises and disposes of them at the home market. To gain his present standard was not accomplished without reverses, crop failures, etc.; but by judicious management he has always kept above the tide and won out. Wheat raising is his favorite industry and the present year (1902) he has sown about two hundred acres. He intends dealing more extensively in mules, however, and raising more alfalfa for pasture.

Mr. Hitchcox was married in 1896, to Miss Millie Gee, of Edgar, Nebraska, where she had lived since a child of three years. Her parents, Isaac and Jennie (Scriven) Gee, were natives of Ohio. After a few years residence in Indiana they emigrated in an early day to Carroll county, Iowa, where Mrs. Hitchcox was born and lived until she was three years of age. Her father is a retired farmer and now resides in Edgar, Nebraska. To Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcox one son has been born, Rolla Worth, a promising little fellow, aged five. They are members of the Jamestown Methodist Episcopal church.

Mr. Hitchcox, like his father, is a Republican and has always affiliated with that party. Our subject has always left a great many of the smaller duties of life for his father to attend, and has been more or less dependent upon the performances of these little items, while he shouldered the more weighty affairs to lesson the burdens of his parent's declining years. Along these lines a good story is told of him: He had not been out from under the parental roof but a brief time when one night soon after his marriage the locality was visited by a heavy storm, and his wife awakened him, saying, "Carl, it is raining, you had better put the window down." Whereupon he drowsily responded, "Pa will put the window down." Notwithstanding this little episode he is a man of energy and sound judgment that have won for him valuable interests, and is ranked among the well-to-do farmers of that section.