The Coon brothers, Jonathan, Isaiah, Michael, James, and their sister, Ruth, came from Indiana to Illinois in 1837, with their father, Adam Coon. Like all of the early settlers they chose their homes in the timber, it being believed that the prairies would never be settled. Like the other pioneers, they cut trees and cleared up farms with much labor, although the broad prairies were all around them. All of the early settlers came from a timbered country and seemed to think that corn and wheat could not be made to grow on prairie soil. All of the Coon family are yet living in the vicinity of Kappa. They are all noted for their honesty, morality and good sense.
John Sloan was born in 1810 in Pulaski County, Kentucky. In 1830 he moved to Indiana and in 1835 moved to the Mackinaw timber east of Kappa. The journey from Indiana was made in a wagon across an unsettled country where there was neither roads or bridges. He built a little pole hut where he and his wife lived as they best could, having no money and but very little of this world's goods. He was Justice of the Peace for sixteen years. In 1862 (being then 52 years old) he entered the volunteer service of the U.S. and was discharged in 1864. He now lives in Gridley and is in receipt of a small pension from the government.
George Washington Cox, another one of the early settlers and patrons of Kappa, was born in 1815 in Oxford County, Maine, and came to Illinois in 1837. The first five years he spent at Hudson with his brother, Samuel, and at Bloomington, where he worked at his trade as cloth dresser. In 1842 he married Taylor Loving's daughter and in 1844 he moved onto what is now called the Cox farm, east of Kappa and now owned by John Merrit. Unlike most of the early settlers, Mr. Cox was not a hunter because
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