Born and reared amid the scenes of rural and pastoral life in the eastern part of the Mississippi Valley and receiving his education in the country school of his neighborhood, George W. Kershner of the Shell Creek district of Wyoming, approached his maturity little dreaming of the stirring and awful scenes of carnage in which he was to take part at the very verge of his manhood. His life began on July 26, 1841 in the state of Ohio where his parents David and Mary (Fletcher) Kershner the former a native of Maryland and the latter of Ohio where then living prosperously engaged in farming. When he was nine years old they moved to Indiana and four years later to Illinois and there he reached his twentieth year without unusual experiences. On August 20, 1861 he enlisted in the Union army as a member of Co. B., thirty-eighth Illinois Infantry and in this command he served three years the most of the time being actively engaged in the field or on the march seeing many of the extreme hardships of the contest and participating in the terrible and bloody battles of corinth, Stone River, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and those of the Atlanta campaigns besides many others. At the end of his three years term he veteranized and was mustered out of the service on March 20, 1866. He then returned to his Illinois home and remained there until 1882, when he removed to Kansas and for the next five years was actively engaged in farming in that state. In 1887 he came to Wyoming and taking up the homestead on Horse Creek on which he still resides devoted his life and energies to raising stock and farming carrying on there a very prosperous business, which has grown largely both in proportions and profits as the years have passed and was brought to him the entire confidence and high respect of his fellow men by the upright and very liberal manner in which it has been conducted. His ranch comprises 200 acres of the best land on the creek, and his herd numbers seldom less than 100 cattle and is always up to a high standard of excellence. With vivid recollections of his military experience and a genuine devotion to his comrades in arms. Mr. Kershner is a local and zealous member of the Grand Army of the Republic but holds affiliation with no other order or fraternity. He was married in Illinois on January 13, 1867, to Miss Cynthalia Layton a native of that state who died in Wyoming on January 13, 1894, leaving these children, Andrew A. and Charles B. (see sketch on other pages), Mary J., Fletcher L., Clark M. and George W. Jr. In the peaceful vocations which he has followed on the fruitful soil of Wyoming he has met the responsibilities of life in every relation with the same manly ready courage and the same loyal devotion to duty which distinguished him on the field of battle and sustained him in the long and wearying marches of the war. And he has maintained in the home of his adoption and mature life the regard and esteem of his associates as he did that of his companions in the struggle for the integrity of the Union. Whether tried by the fierce tests of sanguinary strife or by the less intense but more continued and searching comparisons of every day life, he has come forth untarnished and with merit of a high degree and presents himself without dishonor.
