Lewis Haney Williams was the son of Polly Lawson and John Williams. He married Susan Peters in Scott County, Virginia on 29 Jan 1827. Their first six children were born in Scott and Boone Counties, Virginia. In 1837 the family moved to Lawrence County, Kentucky, where their last six children were born. They lived there until 1854, when a group of their friends and relatives decided to go west to Kansas and take up homesteads. Just before the friends were to leave, Lewis Haney Williams and family decided to pack up and go along. Their two oldest children, Mary Jane Williams Swetnam and Jacob Peters Williams were already located in Kentucky and did not go with the rest of the family.

They left the town of Louisa, Kentucky in 1854 by tug boat on the Big Sandy River to Catlettsburg, where they got on a steamboat on the Ohio River. They went on the Ohio River to Cairo, Illinois where the Ohio empties into the Mississippi, then up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, Missouri, where the Missouri meets. They took the Missouri River west to Westport Landing at the Kansas border. It was a very long, tedious and somewhat crowded trip all the way. At Lee's Summit, Missouri, near the Kansas border, they rented a place and planted a grain crop with which to have something to continue on into Kansas the next year (1855). The children went to school there that winter. The names of some of the families who came along on this trip besides the Williams, were the Burtons, Boggs, Cambells and Careys, and there may have been others.

Lewis Haney Williams, along with some others of the group, made a trip into Kansas to secure their farms. The farms they selected were a few miles west of Willow Springs, in Willow Springs Township, a little north and east of Echo, Kansas and about 15 miles from Lawrence, Kansas. The legal description of the place Lewis Williams decided to pre-empt was the NE quarter of Section 19, Township 14, Range 19 Willow Springs Township, Douglas County, Kansas. He built a log cabin on the place and in 1856 moved his family to it.

He was considered a conscientious, sincere man, strong in his convictions of right or wrong. He was by trade a cabinet maker, but after coming to Kansas, outside of making some necessary caskets for relatives and friends, he was a farmer. He was born August 12, 1806 in Virginia and died of smallpox February 28, 1871. He had loaned some shovels to neighbors to dig a grave for a man named Livermore, who had just passed away with smallpox. It was thought that through his contact with the tools, he contracted the disease. Both Susan and Lewis Williams are laid to rest in the cemetery, which they dedicated for that purpose.