"An Illustrated History of Whitman County, state of Washington." San Francisco:
W. H. Lever, 1901.  p. 394.
 
JOHN W. IMBLER
 
     Among the men who became identified with Whitman county at a very early
date, and who contributed materially to its earliest development, helping to
dispel the darkness of savagery and usher in the dawn of civilization, was the
man whose name gives caption to this memoir. Though he has long since answered
the summons to depart this life, it is eminently fitting that we should
incorporate here a brief sketch of his eminently useful career.
 
     Mr. Imbler was a native of Northfield, Boone county, Indiana, born
September 26, 1842. Ten years later he accompanied his parents on the long
journey to Oregon. The family located at Roseburg, and here our subject passed
the remaining years of his minority and received his education. For several
years after leaving school he was engaged in freighting and with his father in
the latter's wagon-making shop, but in 1872 he came to this county and located
three miles southwest of Alki, where the family now live. He took a homestead
there, also secured other land by purchase, and engaged in stock-raising,
continuing in the same uninterruptedly until March 18, 1888, when death summoned
him hence. As a man and citizen his standing in the community was an enviable
one, and his faithfulness in all the relations of life and his thrift and
enterprise in his business won him the respect of all.
 
     In the state of Oregon, on May 6, 1865, our subject married Miss Sarah A.
Reed, a native of Iowa, whose parents crossed the plains to Oregon in 1849. They
became parents of eight children: Frank E., a farmer in this county; Calvin;
Edith M., wife of William A. Colyar; Arthur; Erne, wife of Ansel J. Mills;
Helen, wife of Fred Lucas, of Sprague; Pearl, wife of Daniel Cook, of this
county; and Maggie.
 
     Mrs. Imbler was again married, in December, 1889, her second husband being
James L. Rippetoe, a native of Virginia, who died December 17, 1898.
 
     Mrs. Rippetoe is the owner of a fine farm of six hundred and forty acres,
and the family are engaged in raising hay and stock principally. They are very
comfortably situated now and are enjoying the rewards of the toil endured and
the hardships undergone in pioneer days when the troublesome and sometimes
terrible Indian was a factor in the land.
 

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Submitted to the Washington Biographies Project in July 2016 by Diana Smith.
Submitter has no additional information about the person(s) or family mentioned
above.