Ben N. Ferguson biography

BEN N. FERGUSON, farmer and stockman, near Iowa Park, and county commissioner of Wichita county, has that degree of substantiality and solidity as a citizen and man of affairs which is always evidenced in such a title as ‘Uncle Ben Ferguson,’ under which caption he would be known to three-fourths of the citizens of Wichita county. He is a type of the true North Texan—able and energetic in all practical material affairs, hearty and western in manner, and with a sturdiness of character and a wholesome nature so commingled from the good qualities of humanity that he grows richer and nobler with the coming and going years.

He is a native of Carroll county, Mississippi, where he was born in 1838, from good southern parents, J. H. and Lucinda (Lee) Ferguson. His father was born in Virginia, was an early settler in Carroll county, Mississippi, and died before the war in Arkansas, whither he had moved in 1855. He was a machinist by trade. He came of a good family, his mother being a cousin of Andrew Jackson. His wife. His wife, who died in Mississippi, was a relative of the General R. E. Lee family.

Mr. Ferguson was reared partly in Mississippi and partly in Arkansas, and when he started out in young manhood it was as a plantation overseer in Ashley county, Arkansas, where his father’s home was. He was a true patriotic son of the south, and on the outbreak of the war he enlisted in Monticello, Arkansas, in 1862, in Company L, Munroe’s regiment, General Cabell’s brigade, and served in the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederate army, being engaged west of the river until the close of the war in 1865. He was at the battles of Prairie Grove, Fayetteville, Cane Hill, and other of the fierce fights that took place in Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas.

Mr. Ferguson came to Texas in 1870, and at his first location at Waco he worked at the carpenter’s trade. In 1875 he went upon a farm in Bell county, and in 1888 he moved up to North Texas in Wichita county and located on his present beautiful ranch six miles south of Iowa Park, which town was just laid out in the year of arrival. At present Mr. Ferguson owns about sixteen hundred acres of the fertile Wichita valley land, and as a farmer and stockman he has been highly successful and is now a man of affluence. Enterprise and resourcefulness are prominent characteristics of the men who have been successful in this portion of state, and Mr. Ferguson is a past master at his business and thoroughly deserves his prosperity. With agriculture and stock- raising his principal occupations, he has not neglected the civil welfare of the community in which he makes his home, and as a county commissioner he represents District No. 3 of Wichita county. He is also a director of the First National Bank of Iowa Park, of which his son William R. is cashier. He fraternizes with the local Masonic lodge, and had religious association with the Christian church.

Mr. Ferguson was married, in 1861, to Miss Susan Elizabeth Myers, a native of Mississippi, and they have four children: William R., Nora, Lillie and Pearl.

Source: B. B. Paddock, History and Biographical Record of North and West Texas, Vol. I (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1906), p. 360.

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