9.    State Farm Building

Grocery of R. T. Grant 1904
Father of Jane Grant
Co-Founder of the New Yorker Magazine
Circa 1874
    Jane Grant was born in Girard in 1892, the younger daughter of R. T. and Sophronia (Cole) Grant.  Grant and his wife’s parents, Gideon P. Cole and Elizabeth Brown, came from Canada. Gideon P. Cole at the age of sixteen went to sea with his older brother, a sea captain, for five years. Later he farmed in Illinois and was again employed as a sailor before coming to a farm southeast of Cato in 1868, where he had 530 acers of land. In 1883 he moved to Farlington, and a few years later to a farm at the edge of Girard. He was a road supervisor, justice of the peace, school board member, and a devout Baptist. His first wife Elizabeth Brown, by whom he had nine children, was said to have been a relative of John Brown and Roger Williams, who was driven from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and found Providence in 1636. By his second wife, Gideon Cole had seven more children. Both wives were redheads. George E. Cole, county clerk several times and Kansas state auditor, was a child of the first wife, as was Sophronia, who became the mother of Jane Grant.
   Sophronia Cole was a teacher, and according to her daughter’s recollection she was the first female in Kansas to hold a first-grade teaching certificate. At her death she left two daughters, Edith, 14, and Jane, 6. Jane excelled at music and had gained a reputation for singing and performing as a small child. Her teacher, Mrs. Volney Boaz, planned to retire from teaching, so it was suggested that Jane might go East to study for a year, return to Girard, and take over as music teacher. However, Jane had other ideas, knowing that if she went “East” she wanted to stay and become a singer or actress. At the age of 16, after graduation from the three-year course in the Girard High School, Jane was on her way to New York to study music. That spring, Miss Willie Warner, who had married and lived at Roselle Park, a short distance from New York City, finally returned to visit Girard after many years’ absences. When she heard Jane sing, invited her to come live with her and her husband and study music.
   After the death of Miss Willie, two of her friends helped Jane with her musical education.
Financially it was hard going, so Jane wrote to her father for financial help, but he didn’t wish to help. She then wrote and ask him to sell her mother’s piano and send her the money. A much-needed check arrived, but later when she visited her father, she found her piano still there. Finally, she got a job on the New York Times taking down society items, and from that beginning she became a journalist and reporter. During World War I she served nearly a year in France with the motion picture bureau of Y.M.C.A., and also entertained troops. There she me Harold Ross, a native of Aspen, Colorado, who had become the editor of the Stars and Stripes. When the war was over she received a promotion from the New York Times and Married Ross. Ross and she then founded the New Yorker magazine.  Jane, who retained her maiden name of Grant, became a noted reporter, wrote for the Saturday evening post, and interviewed many famous people, including wives of presidents. She also covered the flight of Charles Lindbergh in 1927. When Jane’s relatives and members of the Chamber Commerce of Girard heard that she was acquainted with Lindbergh, and that he was planning to fly over several towns and drop greeting scrolls, they bombarded her with telegrams to ask “Lindy” to fly over Girard. She told Lindbergh as a child she had witnessed the unsuccessful flight of the first airship manufactured west of the Mississippi River. He readily granted her request.
   Harold Ross and Jane Grant, (as founding president of the Lucy Stoner League, she retained her maiden name), once visited Girard, where Jane introduced her husband to her old and dear friend Marcett Haldeman-Julius, and Emanuel, the noted publisher. One might have expected the two men to have had much in common; yet when Ross found out Emanuel was no longer a Socialist, having made so much money selling Little Blue Books, he rejected any possible friendship.
   Jane’s marriage to Harold Ross ended in divorce after nine years, but even after that she had a great influence on the New Yorker magazine, and was one of the noted writers of her day.
She later married William B. Harris, editor of Fortune magazine. Upon their retirement, they founded White Flower Farm, a prestigious seed company in Connecticut. She died March 126, 1972.