Writing this on Father’s Day, June 21, I would like to share five generations of Ferguson fathers.
We are most familiar with Thompson Benton (T.B.) Ferguson. His father was Abner B. Ferguson (1823-1900) who enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War when T.B. was three-years-old Thompson Benton Ferguson Wikipedia. T. B. Ferguson was born March 17, 1857 near Des Moines, Iowa. On June 9, 1885 at age 28, Ferguson married 16year-old Elva Ursula Shartel Ferguson.
T.B. and Elva Ferguson had five children, including three girls who all died in infancy or childhood. However, two sons, Walter Scott Ferguson (1886-1936) and his younger brother, Tom Jr. “Trad” (born May 3, 1891) arrived in Watonga when Trad was about 18 months of age. Trad died of the Spanish Influenza in January 1919 while in the Army Air Corps at Ft. Sill. He had been married only about six months.
Walter Scott and his wife Lucia Loomis Ferguson had three children: Ruth Elva, Thomas Benton and Thomas Bruce Ferguson. Ruth Elva was born in 1916, in Cherokee where they published the Cherokee Republican. Ruth, in later life, edited her mother’s Scripps-syndicated column, “A Woman’s View”.
Thomas Benton was born in the NW bedroom of the Ferguson Home in Watonga in 1919. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma, he worked on the advertising staff of the Fort Worth Press and illustrated personality sketches of local figures (also his grandmother Elva’s book, “They Carried the Torch…”). Benton and Ruth compiled their mother’s 37 years of writing into the book “A Woman’s Viewpoint: The Best Columns of Lucia Loomis Ferguson” (the museum has a copy). The third child, Thomas Bruce Ferguson, MD (1923-2013) was a cardiovascular surgeon and president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery and Society of Thoracic Surgeons and editor of the Society’s Journal. He pioneered cardiovascular surgery at Washington University Thomas Bruce Ferguson Obituary.
The fifth generation of Ferguson fathers include the children of Dr. Thomas Bruce Ferguson: Bruce, Linda and Scott. Bruce Ferguson is a cardiovascular surgeon at East Carolina Heart Institute at East Carolina University Dr. Bruce Ferguson. There you have five remarkable generations of Ferguson fathers.