Charles Sharp Lanham has been a resident of Hood County forty-four years, and his career has been that of a successful stock farmer. Mr. Lanham's home is near Cresson on the Granbury Road.

He was born in Eastland County, Texas, December 2, 1881. His father, Abe Lanham, was born in Illinois, April 19, 1835, son of Randolph Lanham, a native of the same state, who followed farming and stock raising, and died in Illinois in 1837. Abe Lanham first came out to Texas in 1879, and about a year later came again from Missouri and settled in Eastland County, and after a year moved to Parker County, and two years after that settled permanently in Hood County, living on a stock ranch three miles west of Cresson, where he had his home until his death, July 26, 1910. He had grown up in Missouri. In that state he married his first wife, her Christian name being Alla. Of the six children born to them, four died in early childhood. The daughter, Alice, born in April, 1861, was first married to Stephen Jackson, by whom she had one child, and she is now the wife of Hunter Ferrell, a prominent farmer and real estate owner at Plano in Collin County, Texas. The other child, Orra, born in 1865, died at the age of fourteen. Abe Lanham married near Greenfield, Missouri, September 5, 1877, Margaret Sharp, whose father, Esau Sharp, was a native of Tennessee and a farmer and slave owner. Margaret Sharp was the sixth in a family of eleven children, and her two living sisters are Mrs. Annie Stephenson, of Pueblo, Colorado, and Elizabeth Betty of Sparta, Oklahoma. Abe Lanham by his second marriage had six children: Kate, born February 23, 1879, is the wife of G.E. Row, a farmer and stock man at Cresson, Johnson County; Charles Sharp; Ralph, born December 25, 1883, a farmer, stockman and dairyman in Hood County, married Stella Wolfe and has two children; Edna, born July 6, 1885, became the mother of two children by her first husband, S.E. Chadwick, and she is now the wife of Frank Milburn, a hardware merchant at Weatherford, Texas, and by that union has one child; Abe, Jr., born July 26, 1887, a farmer and stockman, died in Hood County May 26, 1919, being the father of four children, three of whom are now living, by his marriage to Elsie Horton, who is now the wife of J.M. Mason, a Hood county farmer and stock raiser, and there is one child by her second marriage; and Otho, born September 15, 1893 a stock man in Hood County, married Eppie Lou Reeves and has four children.

Charles Sharp Lanham grew up on his father's farm in Hood County, getting his education in the schools at Cresson. He was on the farm with his father to the age of twenty-one, and since then his interests have been those of a farmer and stock raiser in the same community. He first bought some land in Hood County, where he remained two years, then spent five years farming on his father's place and from there moved to his present homestead four miles from Cresson. Mr. Lanham is owner of 1,850 acres of land in Hood County, and he runs on the average two hundred head of cattle. He is a member of the Baptist Church and has always been interested in community affairs.