RICHARD R. BELL, MASSENA.
RICHARD R. BELL, the president and controlling force of the Wiota Savings Bank, is a native of Guernsey county, Ohio, born on August 26, 1859. His parents were Henry and Margaret (Shipman) Bell. The father was born in Washington county, Pa., and removed to Ohio with his parents when he was six years of age. Henry Bell was brought up and educated in Guernsey county, his common school training being supplemented by a course of study at Madison College. In 1865, some years after his marriage, he came to Guthrie county, Iowa, where he remained two years, and then removed to Grove, then Atlantic township. Mr. Bell was twice married, Richard R. being the eldest of five children by his first union. Mrs. Margaret Bell died in the spring of 1869, and in December of that year he was again married to Jane A. Tweed, a native of Henderson county, Ill., by whom he had eight children.
Richard R. Bell, of this sketch, came to Guthrie county in 1865, accompanying his parents as a boy of six, and two years later removed with them to Cass county. He remained at home until he reached the age of twenty-one, then bought a farm in Grove township, upon which he lived until 1889, when he moved to Franklin township, in which he has resided ever since.
In 1901 Mr. Bell was elected a member of the Board of Supervisors, on which he served three years. He has also filled other township and county offices with credit to himself and advantage to the locality, among them that of president of the school board, which he occupied seven years. He was married on January 24, 1883, to Mary E. Prall, a native of the township in which they now live. They have six children, Ross H., Gertrude V. B., Robert R., Margaret L., Rupert W. and Ruth M.
In political faith Mr. Bell has been an ardent Republican from his youth, and an active worker in the party harness. Fraternally, he holds membership in the Masonic order. In business he is exact and holds everybody to the line' in public duties, he is far-seeing and enterprising; in social life, he is genial and entertaining; in all the elements of good citizenship, he is a fine type of the cultivated American gentleman, full of progressiveness for the welfare of his locality and State and full of devotion to the best interests of his country and all its people.
From "Compendium and History of Cass County, Iowa." Chicago: Henry and Taylor & Co., 1906, pg. 266.
