Aged 69 years.

Info from Sharon Slay:

John SHARP was born on 19 Jul 1810. He died on 24 Sep 1861.

From Chase County Historical Sketches, 1940
THE SHARP FAMILY
JOHN SHARP and his wife NANCY LANDRUM and their FIFTEEN SONS AND DAUGHTERS

The Sharp family, John and his wife, Nancy Landrum Sharp, was among the earliest settlers in Chase county. Their names appear in the census of 1860.

The Sharps and Landrums were of English, Welsh, and German descent. Both families were residents of Anderson County, Tenn., when John Sharp and Nancy Landrum were married at Clinton, in 1833. The Landrums were of the wealthy, slave-owning class, while John Sharp, although owning several slaves, was radically opposed to slavery as an institution. After their marriage, John and Nancy Sharp established their home on a plantation near Wallace Crossroads, Tenn., where they lived until 1855, engaged in agricultural pursuits, mainly the raising of corn, cotton, and tobacco. Here also was born to them a large family of boys and girls, thirteen of whom grew to maturity, married and passed the Sharp blood on to future generations.

In 1855, Mr. and Mrs. Sharp decided to move their family to a wider horizon and a free soil; so one day at Knoxville, Tenn., they gave their slaves their freedom, and added the gift of a new suit of clothes, and some money in pocket and a blanket to each, to assuage the grief of parting. After this they disposed of their land holdings, and outfitting their little cavalcade at Bill Wallace’s store, they started for Kansas with their two ox-teams, two cows, one horse and two hounds. Their conveyances were so haveily laden that the men of the party, and sometimes the women, walked most of the way.

When the Sarp family reached Marysville, Mo., they had learned so much of the unsettled conditions in Kansas, due to Border warfare between the Pro-Slavery and Anti-Slavery facions, that they decided to remain at that place for a while. They made their home there for four years. Then, in March, 1860, they came to Kansas by way of Fort Leavenworth.

In Tennessee, March had always meant Spring-time and balmy weather, but this March was different. Between St. Joseph and Fort Leavenworth these pioneers were overtaken by a blizzard – a typical “Norther,’ in which they suffered terribly from dust and cold. The children were wrapped in feather-beds and the women in quilts, and not until they were warmed by the cheerful fires at the Fort, were their sufferings ended. However, undaunted, they pursued their journey and reached Chase County, Kansas, the latter part of April, 1860. He was married to Nancy LANDRUM in 1833 in Clinton, Tennessee.

Nancy LANDRUM was born on 15 Sep 1815 in Anderson Co., Tennessee. She died on 13 Feb 1885 in Bazaar, Chase Co., Kansas. From ‘PrairyErth’ by William Least Heat-Moon: At the turn of the century Bazaar [KS] was the terminus of a Santa Fe spur and one of the largest cattle-shipping points in Kansas. From its pens--now also gone--grass-fat steers went down the line to end up on dinner plates in Kansas City, Chicago, New York. The village sits nearly at the juncture of Rock Creek and the South Fork of the Cottonwood in the southeast corner of the quadrangle, six miles north is the Falls, near where highway 177 leaves its course through creek and river bottoms to rise onto the hills almost at the center of Chase, bypassing Bazaar and then dropping in the vale of the South Fork and heading toward the southern county line. The river and large streams here--Rock, Buck, Spring--and the roads that follow them strike similar southwest-northeast courses; only Den Creek runs counter. Sharp’s Creek also comes in contrary, but just the mouth of it nips into the quad; with no other village near, inhabitants along the farther reaches of the stream belong to Bazaar. To it, then called Frank’s Creek, in 1860 came John and Nancy Sharp of Tennessee, who had freed their slaves and headed west only to be driven eastward again by the great drought and subsequent starvation that forced out thirty thousand other Kansas immigrants, but the Sharps held on near Missouri and returned to the Flint Hills with the rain. A year later John died and left Nancy with their thirteen children. She raised sheep and planted cotton and made herself a small gin, spun wool and cotton together, concocted dyes from oak and walnut bark, and sold the cloth in Lawrence and thereby kept the children alive, and some of the descent today live along the creek. People say that before she died in 1884 Nancy, who had learned to extract essences and life from the rocky land, cut a goose quill and with ink made from pokeberries put her X to her last testament.