My Genealogy Hound

JAMES M. FRANTZ was born at New Lexington, Perry county, Ohio, February 21, 1835, and is the son of William and Nancy (Rush) Frantz. His father was born in Somerset county, Pa., April 8, 1808. At the age of twenty he moved to Perry county, Ohio, where he met and married Miss Nancy Rush three years later. William Frantz was a farmer by occupation and lived in Perry county until 1867, when he removed to Warren county, Ill., where he died in 1867. His wife died in 1875.

The paternal grandfather of the subject of this sketch was John Frantz, who was a Pennsylvanian by birth, and Samuel Rush, the maternal grandparent, was a native of Pennsylvania, and a captain in the war of 1812.

James M. Frantz was the eldest of a family of nine children, and at twenty-one went to Warren county, Ill., where he followed agricultural pursuits for a few years. He also spent several years in various mercantile pursuits. In 1873, he emigrated to Kearney, Nebr., and engaged in the drug business. The present lively young city of Kearney was then a mere frontier hamlet with only two or three hundred inhabitants. During the terrible blizzard on April 8, 1873, Mr. Frantz was there keeping a drug store and living in the upper story. The storm raged so fiercely that he did not come down stairs to open his store for three days. There were several car loads of cattle and hogs snow bound on the side tracks that actually perished. After the storm had passed over, the cars were emptied, and the dead stock hauled some distance south of town, where a good portion was consumed by a band of Pawnee Indians. During Mr. Frantz’s residence in Kearney, he purchased and shipped fifty car loads of buffalo bones. A great many settlers, for want of other employment, would gather buffalo bones from the prairie and market them to get money to supply themselves with the necessaries of life. He witnessed the trouble with the drunken cowboys in Kearney, in 1874, and saw two of them shot on their horses by village officials.

James M. Frantz was married, January 31, 1861, to Miss Mary A. Campbell. The five children born of this union are named Canzada, Mina, Areta, Harry and Charlie.

Mrs. Frantz was born in Fayette county, Pa., June 28, 1842, and is the daughter of James M. and Jane N. (Smiler) Campbell, both of whom were natives of Pennsylvania. They emigrated to Illinois in 1853, and engaged in agricultural pursuits. Her mother died in 1875 and her father in 1889. Mr. Frantz is now in the drug business in the flourishing little town of Armada, Nebr., and is meeting with splendid success. He is a prominent member of the masonic fraternity, and both he and his estimable wife belong to the Christian church.