George Horine Keller, of Leavenworth, was born February 22, 1801 in Mercer county, Kentucky. He died on his farm at Springdale, Leavenworth county, Kansas, November 13, 1876. His wife, Nancy J. Van Dyke, was born at the same place in the year 1805, and died in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1881. Both were descended from Holland Dutch stock. Valentine Keller and Garret Van Dyke emigrated to this country from Holland and settled in Pennsylvania, but subsequently removed to Mercer county near Harrodsburg, in Kentucky. Keller worked on his father's farm till manhood, and after he married they emigrated to the territory of Indiana, settling on a timbered farm near Terre Haute. It required heroic efforts to effect a clearing in those impenetrable forests in those days in order to do much farming, but being a man of inflexible energies he performed the difficult task. He gave his attention mostly to stock raising and prospered well. He finally constructed a large inn on the National Road, which he managed for several years. He moved about the year 1835 to Platte county, Missouri. Here he engaged in farming and manufacturing till the year 1850, but catching the gold fever, he sold out, equipped a large train with merchandise and went to California during the spring of that year. Settling down in the Sonoma valley, he founded the town of Petaluma, now a prosperous city of some 10,000 people. He returned in 1852 to Weston, and at once embarked in farming, and was thus engaged until the spring of 1854, when he and other citizens of Weston founded the town of Leavenworth, Kan., to which place he removed his family in the fall of that year, after completing the Leavenworth Hotel, the third building ever constructed in that city. Selling this property in 1855, he built the Mansion House at the corner of Fifth and Shawnee streets, which was operated by him until the sale in 1857. Here John Sherman and other members of the Congressional Investigating Committee of 1856, stopped during their sojourn in Leavenworth. He early imbibed the principle of freedom for the slaves and took and maintained a determined stand in making Kansas a free state. No man was more outspoken in his private and public utterances than he, and because of this he was branded as an abolitionist and marked not only for expatriation but assassination. At the end of the fight he became a member of the first free-state territorial legislature. He used his time and money in securing the election of James H. Lane and Marcus J. Parrott to the United States Senate. He succeeded with the former, but lost in the latter. Under Governor Crawford, he became the first warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary. In 1866 he retired to his farm at Springdale, Leavenworth county, where his generous, useful and blameless life passed away at the age of seventy-six years, without an enemy in the world. John Speer said: "His name was a synonym of honesty, integrity, and patriotism; his house in Leavenworth illustrated the proverbial hospitality of the "old Kentucky Home." (Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society 1907-1908, Vol. X, edited by Geo. W. Martin, Secretary, State Printing Office, Topeka, 1908, page 211)