Stone Gardens: At the turn of the last century an Ohio-born physician helped mend the citizens of Benton County
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, when Benton County still ran more on wagon ruts and orchard towns than on rail depots, a country doctor named James W. Fergus worked the line between Benton and Washington counties. Neighbors knew him as Dr. J. W. Fergus of Robinson and Elm Springs.
Goodspeed’s 1889 history of Benton County already listed him among the county’s prosperous physicians. A later local chronicle of Elm Springs named him among the handful of doctors who served that spring town after the Civil War.
He was born October 29, 1852, in Miami County, Ohio, the son of Samuel Fergus and Malissa J. Woodward. Samuel was an Ohio man of Scotch descent, a farmer, and a Union soldier in the Civil War. Malissa was a native of Illinois. The family lived in Iowa from 1860 until 1866, then moved to Jasper County, Missouri. By the time Goodspeed’s sketch was written, Samuel was living in Ashland, Oregon.
James was reared in that westward-moving household and schooled first in the common schools, then at the high school in Pierce City, Missouri. He took his medical degree at Joplin Medical College in Joplin, Missouri, and was graduated as an M.D. in March 1883. The Goodspeed sketch, written while he was still living, says he first practiced at Bloomington in Benton County, then in 1879 removed to Elm Springs and the same year settled at Robinson, where he was still practicing when the book went to press.
The dates sit a little uneasily beside the 1883 diploma, a common wrinkle in those commissioned county biographies. What is firm is the geography. Bloomington, also called Mudtown and later absorbed into the story of Lowell, sat on the old Wire Road in Benton County. Robinson was a Benton County settlement on the south side of the county, named for early Robinson families who had come from Tennessee.
Elm Springs, on the Benton and Washington line, grew around a spring and an elm, with a mill, a Methodist church, a Masonic lodge, and a short list of resident doctors. Washington County’s historical notes later put J. W. Fergus on that list with O. C. Summers, David Crockett, H. W. Graves, T. L. Cooper, and Charles Robinson.
In the latter part of 1878 he married Elmira Smith, born October 30, 1854, in Newton County, Missouri, a daughter of Howell Smith, a Methodist minister from Tennessee. She went by Myra. After the Civil War her family moved into northwest Arkansas. The marriage produced five children named in Goodspeed: Elbert, called Eb; James; Franklin; Carrie; and William. James A. Fergus was born November 12, 1881, at Elm Springs. Frank H. Fergus was born April 2, 1884, at Robinson in Benton County. Carrie later married J. W. Rhodes Sr. and lived for a time in Osceola. William F. Fergus was living in Miami, Oklahoma, when his mother died.
The practice was the ordinary hard work of a rural physician, saddle and buggy work across two counties, and it supported a household that put children through school at Elm Springs, Springdale, and the University of Arkansas.
Frank taught after college, served two years as assistant principal at Clarendon in Monroe County, and was assistant superintendent of Springdale High School in the 1906 and 1907 term before rheumatism forced him home He died August 11, 1909, at his parents’ house near Elm Springs, after more than two years of illness, and was buried by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.
James A. read medicine in Louisville and St. Louis, practiced a season with his father at Elm Springs, then opened in Rogers in 1908. He later took specialty work in Chicago in diseases of the eye, ear, and throat, built a house on South Third Street in Rogers, and was doing well when bone tuberculosis ended the work. He died May 7, 1917, at his mother’s home near Elm Springs. A special train on the Kansas City and Memphis carried nearly a hundred Rogers friends and lodge brothers to the funeral.
Dr. James W. Fergus suffered a stroke of paralysis in the winter of 1913 and 1914 and never recovered. He died September 16, 1914, at his home in Elm Springs. The Rogers Democrat of September 17 reported the word that had reached town the previous morning and that his son, Dr. J. A. Fergus, had gone down on the first train.
Funeral services were held at the family home. The Springdale News of September 25 printed a longer notice and placed the death in the same week. He was sixty-one. The stone in Elm Springs Cemetery carries Masonic and Odd Fellows emblems and the dates October 29, 1852, and September 16, 1914.
Myra Fergus outlived him by thirty five years. In her last seven years she made her home in Osceola with her daughter, Mrs. J. W. Rhodes Sr. She died July 25, 1949, at ninety-four, a member of the Methodist Church, and was brought back to Elm Springs for burial beside her husband. A memorial service was held first at Swift’s Chapel in Osceola. Rev. Will Sherman of Fayetteville officiated at Elm Springs.
The family plot in Elm Springs Cemetery holds the doctor, Myra, Frank, and James A.
His legacy lingers in the Goodspeed paragraph that first fixed his name to Benton County, the local list of Elm Springs physicians, and the obituaries that followed the household from Robinson and Elm Springs to Rogers and Osceola.
He left no famous clinic and no wartime commission. He left a country practice on the Benton County line, a Methodist household, and a stone that still gives the dates.
