HISTORY OF CLAY COUNTY                      281

near Ashboro. Mrs. Ferguson, who died July 6, 1891, aged sixty-one
years, eleven months and seven days, is remembered as a lady of unusual
vivacity, intelligence, social qualities and conversational powers. Mr. Fer-
guson was an exceptionally well read man in history, political economy
and practical science, a profound thinker and philosopher. In politics
he was an uncompromising Democrat of the Jacksonian school and an
able defender of its principles. At a very early date, in a public address,
delivered in the fall of 1858, he not only suggested but made the declara-
tion that beneath the soil of Clay county were vast deposits of valuable
minerals. Recognized as authority on the geological formation and
resources of the county, he was not only chosen geologist for the county
agricultural society at the time of the reorganization in 1871, but within
the same year honored by election as corresponding member of the In-
dianapolis Academy of Sciences. For many years he performed faith-
fully for the agricultural department at Washington the work of statisti-
cian for Clay county, supplying regularly the data for the monthly reports
issued from this department. He died March 9, 1896, aged eighty-nine
years, three months and eighteen days.
    In compliance with an invitation extended by the management of
the Clay Trotting Park Association, Mr. Ferguson delivered the follow-
ing address on the occasion of the society’s second annual fair, given on
its exhibition grounds, in the month of September, 1874:

    Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Clay County Park Asso-
ciation :—What a man does tells best what he is. No words of
mine, however well chosen, can so eloquently tell the ennobling
thought welling up above crude surroundings; the patriotic pur-
poses, buoyant above all taint of selfishness, that prompted the incep-
tion and the prosecution of your enterprise. That better and more
elevated plan in human progress and the better phases of our civiliza-
tion, to which you have attained, are all standing out before us in the
grand entertainment to which we are invited.
    These halls, dedicated to the exhibition of the highest results
of our agriculture, our vegetable, fruit and floral culture; to
the exhibition of the new, the useful and the ornamental in me-
chanic arts and utilized science; to the display of the fine
arts, and the beautiful, and the useful, and ornamental, handiwork,
design, taste and skill in execution, of the matrons and daughters of
our country (for we may not claim all for our county), all tell that
actuated by the better and more ennobling sentiments of our
advanced society, have catered only to those alike advanced and
cultivated. Here you have a proud reward in so grand a success in
bringing hefore us so much to amuse, instruct and benefit. Here
our better tastes are gratified, our inquirings for the better answered
in the tangible object, and our curiosity satisfied. All ages and all
phases of the progress and civilization of humanity have had their
occasions for calling out popular assemblages to be amused,
instructed and elevated, or to be yet more debased and vitiated, as
the character of the entertainment tells on the too plastic minds of
the sightseers of all people, wherever assembled. In our labor for
the more cultivated, the better and more refined, you have not for-
gotten us, more rude and more practical farmers. Your accommoda