Christopher K. Wyly, a prominent and highly respected pioneer citizen of Camden, Tenn., was born in Sequatchie Valley, Tenn., February 2, 1807, and is a son of Harris K. and Arty (Taylor) Wyly, natives respectively of the Old Dominion State and Tennessee. The father came to Tennessee when a young man in the year 1790, and located at Jonesboro, Tenn., where he married. He followed mercantile pursuits in Georgia a few years and spent twenty years or more in agricultural pursuits in Alabama. He died in East Tennessee about 1835. Our subject passed his youthful days in Alabama in securing a limited education in the primitive log schoolhouse of those early days. At the age of nineteen be came to Tennessee and located on the Tennessee River at Old Reynoldsburg, where he began life as a clerk in a mercantile establishment. In 1838 he came to Camden and engaged in the mercantile business for himself, and has devoted his entire life to that business ever since. Mr. Wyly has been one of the few very successful business men of Benton County. He started in life with but little if any capital, but by indomitable industry has succeeded in accumulating a handsome competency, notwithstanding the fact that he lost over $100,000 during the late war. Before the war Mr. Wyly was an old line Henry Clay Whig, and he was strongly opposed to the Rebellion, but after the State was voted out and the Union virtually dissolved, his sympathy and means were extended to the people of the South. In 1839 he married Lemira C. Pavatt, a sister of old Chancellor Stephen C. Pavatt. She died in March, 1876, and left these children: Harris K.; Carrie C., wife of J. S. Bartlett of Texas, and Eva G. Mr. Wyly is not a member of any fraternal or sectarian institution, but is a believer in the Christian religion. He is one of the county's most reliable and successful citizens.