Butler County Genealogy Trails Kansas Thomas Benton Murdock Bio

BUTLER COUNTY'S EIGHTY YEARS BIOS

THOMAS BENTON MURDOCK

(Transcribed by Lori DeWinkler)

In 1841 Thomas Benton Murdock was born in the mountains of Virginia. He was one of five children who lived to maturity, of Thomas and Katherine (Pierrepont) Murdock. From the mother’s side came the pride of the Pierreponts; from the father’s the insurgent instincts of the Irish Murdocks who left Ireland after the Irish rebellion failed in 1798.

So, even though reared in the mountains among most primitive surroundings, the Murdocks who dominated Kansas for half a century have been proud soldiers of the militant democracy. They have been fighters who led naturally, by instinct and training, but never fighters for the old order. They always were pioneers, always moving out into new territory of thought and action, looking forward. Thomas and Katherine Murdock could not endure the iniquity of slavery, so in 1849 they freed their slaves and left the slave country for Ohio. They settled near Ironton but lost everything they had in the panic of 1855 and loaded their household goods on a boat, went down the Ohio to the Mississippi and journeyed as far west as Mt.. Pleasant,Iowa. There the family spent the winter and the father went to Kansas and found a location. He brought his family to Topeka in the winter of 1856-57. They rented a little hotel and kept tavern, among others having for guests, Jim Lane and A. D. Stevens, famous as a border fighter under Montgomery and afterwards killed at Harper’s Ferry, under old John Brown. Going and coming in the little Kansas town of the Virginia abolitionist were the men who made Kansas free an famous in the great conflict that began at Lawrence and ended at Appomattox.

In this atmosphere of strike and patriotism young Benton Murdock, a youth in his late teens, grew up. In 1860 the family homesteaded at Forest Hill, near Emporia, and the father and mother lived in Emporia the remainder of their lives; the father died in 1896 and the mother in 1887.

When the Civil War broke out, Thomas Benton Murdock enlisted with his father and brother, Roland, in the Ninth Kansas Cavalry and served until the end of the war. He served in the Rocky Mountains in 1863 and there met John H. Betts. When they met seven or eight years later, in El Dorado, John Betts kept eyeing Murdock and finally said, “Say, aren’t you the chap that relieved me of that army overcoat out west?” (Murdock’s company was confiscating government property wherever it was found.) Murdock looked at Betts and replied: “Well, I guess I am. But I’m here to start a newspaper. What’s the chance?”

“Bully,” returned Mr. Betts, willing to let bygones be bygones, and they remained friends for forty years.

Returning from the army where he had gone snow blind on the plains—a calamity that hung over him all his later day—young Murdock who had been a hod carrier and general workman as a youth around Topeka, learned the printing trade. He worked in the office of the Emporia News, then owned by P. B. Plumb, and Jacob Stotler who had married Leverah Murdock during the war. His brother, Marshall Murdock, was running the Burlingame Chronicle at the end of the war. Young Benton went back to Ironton, Ohio, married the sweetheart of his boyhood, Frances Crawford, and came to El Dorado, March 4, 1870, and founded the Walnut Valley Times with J. S. Danford. His wife lived only a few years, leaving at her death their daughter, Mary Alice.

From the first Mr. Murdock became a leader of politics in Kansas. He stood for the Walnut Valley and the Kingdom of Butler. In 1876 he was elected a member of the state senate. He served with such men as E. N. Morrill, Charles Robinson, J. M. Hadley, father of the former governor of Missouri; Benjamin F. Simpson, J. R. Hallowell, D. W. Finney, W. A. Johnston, chief justice of Kansas, all member of the senate; while in the house were Lyman U. Humphrey, John Gilmore, A. W. Smith, L. B. Kellogg and P. P. Elder. His political career was fostered and guided by Mrs. Marie Antoinette Culbreth-Murdock who for a generation was wife, friend, comrade, guide and inspiration, and who bore him five children.

In 1880 Mr. Murdock ran for the senate again but was unfairly defeated he though. He sold The Time, moved to Toipeka and became connected with the Topeka Daily Commonwealth, then controlled by the Baker family. But El Dorado held his heart and he returned in 1883 and founded the El Dorado Weekly Republican. The Daily followed the Weekly in 1884 and the paper at one took a prominent place in the affairs of Kansas.

Mr. Murdock was, during the late senator’s life time, a friend and ally of P. B. Plumb. He and Plumb were young men together in Emporia, thought alike and had much in common in training and inspiration. And so after Plumb died the courage and independence and progressive Kansas spirit that made Plumb an insurgent who voted against the adoption of the McKinley bill, lived on in Kansas through Mr. Murdock. He was politically always with the scouts, with the pioneers, ever with the skirmish line. It was the spirit of 1860 in his soul, the rebellion of the ancestral Murdocks in his blood.

In 1888 he again was elected to the state senate. He served until 1892 and was on the committee that tried Theodosius Botkin and went over the old county seat troubles of Western Kansas. He was defeated for reelection by the Populist wave, and until appointed fish and game warden by Governor Stubbs never held public office of any kind again.

But he was a public man all the time. His influence in the state was more rather than less because of the fact that he was not in office. In every Republican state convention for forty years Mr. Murdock was in power of the first class. Yet he sacrificed that power and worked for the primaries which put convention politicians out of power. He never was selfish, and so it happened that he was large enough to retain his influence in the state and multiply it through the primary. Gradually he grew in strength with the people of Kansas, and since 1902—his last alignment with the old political machine—until his death, November 4, 1909, he had been easily the leader of the forward movement in Kansas Republicanism. Others had the honor; but he had made them. He expressed, as no other man had been able to express, the sentiment of popular protest against the wrongs of government by ring rule.