Noble L. Prentis, a leading Kansas editor for twenty-one years, and for the last decade of his life identified with the Kansas City Star, was born on April 8, 1839, in a log cabin three miles from Mount Sterling, Brown County, Illinois. His parents were natives of Vermont, descended from English settlers, and on both sides of the family came of brave Revolutionary stock. His parents died at Warsaw, Illinois, of cholera during the epidemic of 1849, leaving him an orphan at the age of ten years. He went to live with an uncle in Vermont and remained there until he was eighteen, when he moved to Connecticut and served an apprenticeship at the printer’s trade. He then came west and worked for a time in a newspaper office at Carthage, Illinois. At the opening of the Civil war he enlisted as a private in the Sixteenth Illinois Infantry and served four years, when he was honorably discharged. He published a paper at Alexandria, Missouri, until Capt. Henry King of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat induced him to come to Topeka in 1869 and assist him on the Record. During the succeeding eight years he was engaged on the Junction City Union and the Topeka Commonwealth, and about 1877 began to work on the Atchison Champion. He remained with that paper during Colonel Martin’s term as governor and in 1888 took charge of the Newton Republican. In 1890 he accepted a position on the editorial staff of the Kansas City Star, which he held until his death. In 1877 he went to Europe, and his book, “A Kansan Abroad,” was one of the results. He also published many interesting letters, and during the last year of his life wrote a History of Kansas. He died at La Harpe, Illinois, at the home of his daughter and within a few miles of his birthplace, on July 6, 1900.
