HISTORY OF CLAY COUNTY                      241

ing the highest vote that had ever been cast up to that time for any
officer of the Indiana house of representatives. At a later date in the
latter year he re-engaged in the newspaper field, launching the Washing-
ton Republican (Democratic in politics), which he published one year,
then sold out, going to Springville, Lawrence county, where he engaged in
the drug business and staying there until 1844, when he disposed of his
stock and went to Terre Haute, arriving there on the 10th day of June,
taking editorial charge of the Wabash Express until the fall of the same
year, when he entered the drug store of John L. King as a clerk, with
whom he stayed five years, until 1849, when he came to Clay county and
located at Cloverland in general merchandising. Here he was first post-
master, having been mainly instrumental in procuring the office, in which
position he served something more than sixteen years—until he moved to
Staunton, in 1866. In 1852 he was appointed one of the three school
examiners of the county, serving three years in this capacity. In Decem-
ber, 1866, he received the appointment of postmaster at Staunton, which
he held three years. For several years be was the local agent of the Mer-
chants’ Union, later the American Express Company, at Staunton.
    Mr. Lucas was an ardent, active Democrat and played a prominent
part in the politics of the county, having been for many years a member
of the central committee of the party organization and was frequently
honored by election to preside over the deliberations of the party in county
conventions. In 1844, while residing at Terre Haute, he was Richard M.
Thompson’s first lieutenant in the party organization and campaign of
that year in Vigo county.
    Reminiscently, Mr. Lucas was heard to relate on different occasions
that he was in Cincinnati in 1832, at the time of the flood of that year,
when the Ohio river was higher than it had ever been known to be up
to that time, and at the time of the cholera epidemic, when, on “Black
Friday,” forty-three persons died and eight more on the succeeding day,
and eight thousand people, one-third of the population, deserted the city.

    Charles G. Ferguson was a native of Burlington county, New Jersey,
born near Bordentown, October 8, 1814. He learned coach painting at
the age of fifteen years, which he followed in his native state and in the
cities of Philadelphia and Brooklyn until 1846, and during this period of
seventeen years painted many of the first railroad coaches manufactured
in this country, having been in the employment of the Camden & Amboy
Railroad, the first one in the state of New Jersey; he engaged in mer-
cantile pursuits in his native state until 1856, when be came to Indiana,
locating in Putnam county, where he purchased land and engaged in
farming for the period of nine or ten years, then he re-engaged in mer-
chandising, at Webster’s Mill, on Walnut, or Eel river, where he did
business for two or three years, then moved to Harmony, in 1868, where
he continued to do a store business during the remainder of his life, a
period of practically forty years.
    May 19, 1835, he married Miss Elizabeth Bunting, at Bordentown,
who died February 6, 1882. Mr. Ferguson was a close observer and
reader and an interesting conversationalist, endowed with a most remark-
ably retentive memory and enjoyed relating to friends the incidents of
his earlier life experiences. From his great store of reminiscences he
related that when the first locomotive for the Camden & Amboy Railroad
was shipped over from England, the farmers and people generally of the

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