James S. Tolles was born in Orwell, Vermont, September 19, 1800, the son of John Tolles and Catherine Sibley. His father left the family in Orwell in 1802, and walked, carrying a bundle of clothing and an axe, to Batavia, N. Y. where, at the office of the Holland Land Company, he "took up" or "articled" a section of land two miles west of the present village of Attica. That summer he cleared a "patch" of the land and sowed it to winter wheat, and put up a three-sided log shack. That fall, he returned to Orwell, and early in the Spring of 1803, he brought his wife and children in an ox sled together with the very meager household furnishings and farm tools he possessed to this same shack where they lived until a log cabin was erected. James Sibley Tolles lived within a half mile of that shack until his death, March 16, 1885. He was a farmer, millwright, and land surveyor.