164 HISTORY OF CLAY COUNTY

chief scene of operations embraced Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and
Georgia. Captain - Thompson served with Stoneman and Kilpatrick in
their celebrated raids, and was seriously wounded at the battle of
Pulaski,. T.ennessee, in 1864. When he retired from service he was a
major in the army.
    At the conclusion of his military service Captain Thompson re-
turned to the cultivation of his farm in section i6, Washington township,
which he had purchased from his father, but in 1882 he moved to
Bowling Green and formed a partnership with his brother in the dry-
goods business. He thus continued until i886, when he retired from
active business, and continued in comfortable circumstances until the
time of his death in 1905. The deceased was an old and honored mem-
ber of the M. E. church of Bowling Green, and was also identified with
the local Masonic lodge and the G. A. R. post. He was a man of many
and warm friends, a brave soldier, and an active and able citizen.
    Captain Thompson was married October 31, 1854, to Miss Cordelia
Sutliff, born in Lafayette, Indiana, November 3, 1833. daughter of Cur-
tis H. and Jane (Blanton). Sutliff. The father was a native of Kinsman,
Trumbull county, Ohio, and the mother was born in Virginia. Mrs.
Thompson was quite a young child when her father died and her mother
moved with the family to Bowling Green, where she resided until her
death, February 15, 1894. Captain and Mrs. Thompson were the parents
of four children, as follows: Alice, deceased Clinton M., whose biog-
raphy is given elsewhere; Florence, who died in infancy; and John D.
Thompson. The last named and youngest child was born in Bowling
Green, being educated in the schools of that place and the district schools
of Washington township. Except that for two years he assisted his
father in his store, he has spent all his life on the farm.

    BENJAMIN F. KESTER, who is farming in Perry township, was born
in Guernsey county, Ohio, August 26, 1840. His father, Jesse Kester,
was born in Pennsylvania, and in his early life tatight school during the
winter months and clerked in a store in the summers. He was a son of
John and Martha (Hartley) Kester, who were born respectively in New
Jersey and Pennsylvania, and in 1847 he came to Perry township, Clay
county, Indiana, and bought eighty acres of timber land, which he at
once began to clear and improve, but in 1851 he sold that farm and
bought forty acres in section 21, Perry township, which now joins Cory
on the southeast, but the town at that time had not been laid out. He
died on the farm that he had sold, in August of 1851. In 1833, in Ohio,
Mr. Kester had married Lydia E. Webster, who was also born in Penn-
sylvania, a daughter of Joseph and Margaret (Gray) Webster, natives
of Pennsylvania. After the death of her husband Mrs. Kester moved to
a farm in section 21, which was her home until 1865, and thereafter until
her death she lived among her children, dying in Greene county in 1897.
In their family were four sons and three daughters, and all are yet living
with the exception of two, and three are living in the vicinity of Cory.
    Benjamin F. Kester, the fourth born of the seven children, devoted
his early life to farm labor, and in August of 1862 he enlisted in the
Eighty-fifth Indiana Volunteer Infantry, Company I, and was assigned
to the Army of the Cumberland. He took part in many of the decisive
battles of the war, having been at Rawley, North Carolina, at the time
of the surrender of General Johnson, and he also participated in the