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
rural districts of the state of New Jersey petitioned the governor and
legislature not to permit its being used, as it would ruin the state by run-
ning over and killing them and their stock. April 20, 1906, he died at
the ripe old age of ninety-one years, six months and twelve days. He was
the father of George B. Ferguson, of the firm of Moore & Ferguson,
Brazil, and of William H. Ferguson, Washington, Daviess county.