This is Roy, your “Throwback Thursday” guy, with the T.B. Ferguson Museum. I’m stepping in for Joe Bryan who normally writes the Ferguson Feature, He is a much better writer than I am, but I’m glad to add my thoughts, opinions and interpretations of the Fergusons and their story.
About three years ago I jumped in with both feet with the Ferguson Museum. I did it for myself at first, then something happened. I discovered this story of the Fergusons, and I liked it. A story of a young couple with dreams and a lifetime ahead of them. But, like the song lyrics go, “We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.” The dreams were shorter as were lifetimes. Out of those four souls that loaded up on covered wagons at the Kansas border Elva outlived three of them. Yet she went ahead after each loss. A lesson for us all.
T.B. had already claimed an allotment in the 1889 run, gained title to the property and sold it to bankroll this 1892 trip to Watonga. The Fergusons left their lives in Kansas in those covered wagons to start a newspaper in the Oklahoma Territory, not to stake out land, as Elva writes in her book “They Carried the Torch”.
What is it about a local newspaper? This is one of the things that has dramatically changed with our day and time. Today, in the digital age, we are buried with information but in 1892 there were vast information deserts across the world where people would find out about life changing events months after they have happened. War and peace, deaths of leaders, the results of elections and technological innovations. A hometown newspaper was the spring in that information desert.
“ The Watonga Republican” newspaper they started, provided not just reports on people and events, it also provided agriculture prices, passenger and freight prices, real estate, consumer goods, and much more. Not just the “Who’s Who” and small-town gossip. This in a time when the literacy rate in the Territory wasn’t particularly high. Still, people’s success and fortunes would be gambled on the information that the paper provided.
A newspaper that could not provide the best information would cost people money. Accuracy and honesty were not an option, a paper not trusted would soon be out of business. Advertisers would no longer use that paper because people would stop buying it. Likewise, if the opinion articles, current events or anything Front Page related went out of the bounds of social norms, the backlash could ruin a paper. The newspaper business in that time tended, in most part, to have accuracy and honesty in the reporting. In the business world, Darwinian rules demanded the survival of the fittest if nothing else.
The Fergusons couldn’t imagine the world that we live in today just as we can’t truly imagine theirs. Integrity and honesty were the DNA of not only the newspaper they started but also governing principles of their daily life.
Today, the Ferguson Museum is coming out of a long winter. Three years ago, the museum was in a bad place and could have been lost forever. For a time, I believed it might not make it, but I never gave up on it. Now, things are happening and the long winter for the museum may be over. The museum’s friendship with the Plains Collective Arts Festival has led to the creation of the “Living Traditions Series,” a collaboration of the Collective and the Museum. There is a new museum coming to town at Loves #1. Watonga has a new city manager and new faces on the city council. There have been lots of positive for our community and the museum.
Please visit the museum’s social media sites, Facebook, YouTube and our new web site. We have weekly, monthly and annual events throughout the year. Become a member of the friend’s group, volunteer or just support the museum with your ‘clicks”. Until next week and another “Throwback Thursday”, take care of yourselves and be kind to one another.