Ferguson Features

We thank everyone who visited the Friends of the Ferguson booths at the Christmas Bazaar on December 2 at the fairgrounds and at the city hall on December 14. Voting by greenbacks for the best holiday tree was hotly contested with appreciation to the city, Bank 7, The Watonga Republican, Elva’s Tree and Santa’s Tree. My rough estimate of the combined two days of voting was about $160, representing nearly so many votes, especially by young voters. And at the Ferguson Museum on Weigle, Santa (Roy Espy) was busy bringing cheer to young visitors and their families.

Speaking of holiday cheer, I am reminded of Elva Fergusons account of her family’s first Christmas in Watonga in 1892. They were living in a four-room structure with the room having the best light as the print room. “Less than three months after our arrival, Christmas morning dawned cold and blue. Watonga certainly was a funny little place that Christmas morning- a strange town full of strange people – a little pioneer town, a mudhole in the middle of the street, with seven saloons, and was not calculated to cheer the homesick feeling of a woman with boys who had always lived in Kansas and had never seen a saloon.

One of these boys was a baby of only a few months, while the other was a wide-awake boy just old enough to believe in and expect a visit from Santa Claus. The outlook was gloomy for such a visit, and not particularly promising for anything resembling a new country when a woman has a right to be homesick, it is on Christmas while thinking of the folks back home who are all together to celebrate that day. However, those who have the courage to go pioneering, usually have the courage to meet and cope with almost any situation, and it now affords me considerable satisfaction to look back at those pioneering days and think that I had the courage to stay with it.” (Lots of folks were living in dugouts in much more dire circumstance that winter) “And here let me say that if any skeptically inclined person tells you that there is no Santa Claus, don’t you believe him, because there is. I spent that Christmas morning telling Christmas stories to the small boy and wondering how it would be possible under the circumstances to prepare anything resembling a Christmas dinner. While making a heroic effort to keep back tears of homesickness, a knock at the door demanded my attention. When I opened the door, …there was Santa Claus with a basket on his arm smiling and bowing in such a friendly manner that my heart grew warm just to look at him. He wore a fur cap, had funny little side whiskers, was round and fat, with a wonderfully real Christmas look on his ruddy old face. It was hard to understand some of his words but his meaning certainly plain as he put down the basket, patted the little boy of the head and said something about strangers in the strange land, Merry Christmas, and vanished, not up the chimney, but across the bleak street to his little bakeshop, the home of our patron saint.

The basket, when unpacked, revealed many treasures for small boys and first aids to a Christmas dinner. But best of all it was the genuine cheer of having been remembered that made the day a happy one.”

They Carried the Torch by Mrs. Tom B. Ferguson, pages 22-23 originally published 1937 and reprinted 1989 by Levite of Apache