Vincent J. Lane, the veteran of the newspaper profession in Kansas and a leading citizen of Wyandotte County in every way, was born at West Middleton, Washington County, Pennsylvania, on the 27th of January, 1828, and is a son of Joseph and Margaret (McKeever) Lane, the former of whom was born in Pennsylvania, of English lineage, and the latter of whom was born in Virginia, of Scotch-Irish ancestry. The parents continued to reside in Washington County, Pennsylvania, until the close of their lives, and there, in the early days, the father was a manufacturer of furniture at a time when all the work was done by hand.
Vincent J. Lane left home when sixteen years of age, taught school in Virginia and Indiana, and in 1857 located at Quindaro and assisted in laying out the town. He served as postmaster of the village from 1858 to 1861, after which he engaged in farming for four years. In the late ’60s Mr. Lane went to Montana, where the gold excitement was then at its height, and there he continued, with varying success, for nearly two years. He returned to Kansas and located in Kansas City, where he had maintained his home during the long intervening years. For a few years he acted as local representative and reporter for the Kansas City Times, and he then assumed a contract for the construction of twenty miles of the Kansas Pacific Railroad. After the completion of this work he engaged in newspaper work on his own responsibility, by founding the Wyandotte Herald, a weekly paper. With this paper he had since been continuously identified.
Mr. Lane had served two terms as register of deeds of Wyandotte County and was twice elected to represent the county in the lower house of the State Legislature, in which he made a substantial record. He served as postmaster of Kansas City for four years, under the first presidential administration of Grover Cleveland; was a member of the board of education for several years and had otherwise been influential in local affairs.
