John's parents, Sam Wells and Dora Hunter Wells, came to Kansas from
     Illinois. John was born, December 1, 1886, in a covered wagon at Fairview,
     Nebraska, on the way to Kansas. His ancestors were all brick masons and 
     there are many buildings, houses, and country schools that he plastered
     and stuccoed in and around Medicine Lodge. When he retired from masonry,
     he was employed by the city of Medicine Lodge as city engineer. He was
     well known for his good nature and Irish humor. He married Bonnie Pearl
     Adams in Pratt, Kansas, October 20, 1903. They had nine children: Wilma
     Peirson, Cora Pardun, Lester Wells, Velma Strain, Ruth Mays, Leonard Wells
     who was accidentily electrocuted at work, Esther Virginia who died in
     infancy, Beulah Springer, and John Wells, Jr.
       When his parents came to Kansas, they settled in the Sun City area.
     Their first home was a dugout with dirt floor and blanket-hung doors.
     His father became foreman of the gypsum mines at Kling. Kling was a 
     settlement of about twelve houses on a single road with a little store
     and sod school. Jim Gano was storekeeper, and John's mother ran a boarding
     house. Mrs. Wilma Peirson remembers playing in the ruins of an abandoned
     mill at Kling as a child. She also recalls that the evenings were spent
     playing ball on the one street.
       John's father, Sam Wells, was once trapped when a well he was bricking
     caved in, burying him. He spent the rest of that day and night buried
     while men worked to rescue him. He was kept alive by an air pocket formed
     by the timbers.
       They lived in Coats, Kansas in 1908 where their oldest son, Lester, was
     born. Their last years were spent in Medicine Lodge, where John died while
     working for the city at the age of 54 in 1934. His son, Lester, became city
     engineer after his death. His wife died in 1938. When their first child,
     Wilma, was eleven months old his father-in-law died, and his mother-in-law,
     Mrs. Cora Edith Adams, made her home with them until she died in 1932. His
     children remember their home as a busy place, where there was always room
     for one more.
                
     Source:Chosen Land - Barber County, Kansas, pg. 479