Butler County Genealogy Trails Kansas George F. Hayman Bio

BUTLER COUNTY'S EIGHTY YEARS BIOS

GEORGE F. HAYMAN

(Transcribed by Peggy Luce)

George F. Hayman, loyal, upright citizen, and chief engineer of the El Dorado waterworks, belongs to a Butler County pioneer family. He was about twelve years of age when he came to Butler County with his parents in 1870. They settled on the northwest quarter of section 34, Fairview Township, where his father homesteaded a claim.

Mr. Hayman was born in Meigs County, Ohio, in 1857, a son of H. H. and Emeline (Costen) Hayman, natives of Maryland, and parents of the following children; Mrs. Mary R. Hudson, who came to Kansas with her parents, and died here in 1875; R. H. who died in Middleport, Ohio; Thomas, who died in Ohio; Mrs. Rosa A. Fountaine, who died in Butler County; Charles A., who lives in Wichita; George F., the subject of this sketch; and Hervey C. Hayman, who resides on the old homestead in Fairview Township. The father died in 1873, and the mother in 1883.

George Hayman grew to manhood on the old homestead in Butler County, remaining there until he went to Ohio in 1890. After for years of residence in Middleport, Ohio, and in Chicago, Illinois, where he worked in a clothing and hat store, he returned to Butler County, and on March 1, 1894, began working in the El Dorado waterworks department as engineer. He has had charge of that department of the system forty-one years and is one of the most reliable and capable men ever in the employ of El Dorado city.

Mr. Hayman was married January 10, 1906, to Miss Millie Barker, of Eureka, Kansas, a daughter of James T. and Mary (Sigman) Barker. Mr. and Mrs. Baker died in Pomona, California, Mr. Barker on February 23, 1914, and Mrs. Barker on August 3, 1921. Mr. Barker came to Butler County in 1882 and built a home in Brainerd, where the family lived a number of years. Mrs. Hayman’s sister, Mrs. Dona Barker Jackson, lives in Los Angeles, California.

Mr. and Mrs. Hayman have no children. They live in their own cozy home at 407 North Star Street.

Mr. Hayman’s boyhood observation of early day incidents made a deep impression upon his mind. He recalls scarcity of food and the hardships of the pioneers following the devastation of grasshoppers in 1874. He recalls that during that time, a ray of cheer came through the gloom in the shape of a barrel of flour and pork and a barrel of beans which were sent by his uncle, I. T. Hayman, who lived in Kentucky. The pioneers had other troubles besides grasshoppers and scarcity of food. Ague was prevalent. One thing could always be depended upon, no matter how uncertain were crops or weather, was the chill and fever that came at the regularly appointed time of the day. However, the Hayman family, after suffering with ague several months, wrote to Mr. Hayman’s mother’s brother, Dr. I. T. Costen, at Pocomoke City, Maryland, who prescribed “Fowler’s Solution,” which shortly gave relief. It was a co-incidence that Dr. Costen’s children were then pupils in a school taught by Mrs. Marie Antoniette O’Daniel, who later came from Maryland to El Dorado, and who, in February of 1873, dismissed her pupils in the El Dorado school that the funeral of Mr. Hayman’s father could be held in the school room. She later married Thomas Benton Murdock.

The early settlers’ lives were not all made up of grief, grasshoppers and ague. They had pastimes which they enjoyed fully as much as people enjoy entertainment of today. The dances, “literaries” and other amusements left bright spots in the memories of those who lived here in pioneer days, Mr. Hayman says.