|
Charles Hiram Ferguson (1872–1956)
Charles, a machinist, had married Sara in 1894. In 1903 he described himself in
city directories as a hardware manufacturer, operating in office #635 at 315 Dearborn.
Given the lack of newspaper references, even during later decades as the head of a
large, successful company, it is likely he was very introverted. His wife made
up for it.
Sara aka Sallie Basset Mcculloch Ferguson (1872–1931)▼2
Sara was a enthusiastic pianist and music teacher. She'd graduated from the St. Louis Conservatory
of Music, taught at the Chicago Conservatory, and performed in Lake View Musical Society recitals.
For all her efforts at self promotion in Chicago, residents of Waco, Texas, her
hometown, were her most appreciative audience.
In the smaller pond, about twenty thousand residents then, she was a child of a
prominent family.
Champ-Carter McCulloch (1841–1907)
was a celebrated Confederate military officer, grocer, and former mayor of Waco. His wife,
Emma Basset McCulloch (1843–1929),
retired from teaching music and penmanship at
Baylor University to birth
and raise a herd of ten McCulloch children.
The family's sprawling
Greek-revival-styled home on Columbus Avenue is a museum today, last occupied by a family member in 1971.
Grace Adele "Gradele" Ferguson (1896–1977)
Named after Sara's sister, Grace Darling McCullogh (1891–1956), Grace Ferguson was
the only survivor of Sara's three children. Of the two who died in childbirth, one
was Charles Ferguson jr, who died the same year that Grace was born and may have
been her twin.
Though the poor quality image from her passport photo (above) doesn't reflect it, multiple
newspaper references in Waco referenced Grace's beauty as a child and young woman.
One genealogy researcher reports that Grace's first name was Matilda but the month
of birth and year of death for Matilda Ferguson conflicts with other source information
for Sara's daughter, including the 1900 U.S. Census, newspaper stories.
|
|
In the years after the fire
Sara and Charles moved to Valhalla, NY around 1906 and divorced in 1907. Charles remained in New
York and Sara and Grace returned to her hometown in Waco to build a clientele of piano students. In 1919 while
performing for troops with the
Over There Theater League sponsored by the YMCA in Europe during WWI, she met and married a marine from Waxahachie, Texas who was twenty
years her junior. William Lawrence Harding jr,(1893–1980)▼4 was a career military officer
identified in the 1920 U.S. Census as an Octoroon. She lived with him for a
time in Hawaii, in Shanghai, China in 1928, and in San Diego at the time of her death in 1931. They attended a military dance just four months earlier but I failed to learn
anything of her passing, not even where she was buried. The McCulloch family plot in Waco was most likely but I did not find her name in the
Waco's Oakwood Cemetery's online registry. Her husband may have had her buried in San Diego or sent her ashes to her family and they were
buried in an unmarked grave. He remarried two years later and retired as a Major and was
buried in the Arlington National Cemetery. He first retired in 1938 but his obituary
credited his service in both WWI and WWII, leading me suspect he went back into service
during WWII.
Charles Ferguson in 1919 married dress shop owner Jessie Turner. Three years later he invented
a portable gasoline generator
to power lighting and tools on his farm, an invention on which he founded the Home Electric
Lighting Company, by 1921 called Homelite.▼5 In 1927 Homelite had forty employees,
2,000 distributors, and shipped around the world. Charles stepped down as CEO
around 1941 but wife Jessie remained on the board as a director and at his death
personally owned fourteen percent of the stock. He spent the last three years of his life,
from 1951 until 1954, confined to a sanitarium, declared mentally incompetent.
After his death in 1956 Jessie and daughter Grace sued for shares of his three million
estate made up chiefly of eighty-six percent of the Homelite Corporation.
Grace, in 1910, possibly to avoid confusion with her aunt Grace Darling McCulloch with whom Grace
Ferguson and her mother Sara then lived in Waco, Grace adopted a new name. She combined her first and middle names, Grace and Adele
to form Gradele. I do not know if she she legally changed her name but she used it
for the rest of her life. In 1914 the Waco newspaper referred
to her as Gradele but clarified they were discussing the woman the community knew as Grace Adele Ferguson.
Reportedly Gradele spent the 1911/12 school year at the
St. Genevieve of the Pines convent in Asheville, North Carolina (1908–1987) but in
1914 her mother announced that her girl was going to pursue a career in acting.
The only professional theatrical reference was that same year when she appeared in Ben Hur when it played
in Fort Wayne, Indiana in April. She married Steven Beard in 1917, divorced him a year later, and went with
the Red Cross to drive ambulances in France. In 1921 she visited her mother and stepfather in Hawaii where she escaped an attack by
sharkes, eels and devil fish, and that same year married William Stoudt (1888–1864), a divorcee with seven children by a previous
marriage. In 1923 Gradele and her mother were both living in San Diego, married to military men. The marriage to Stoudt
ended in divorce and by 1926 she was married to a man named Starr, possibly Neil Star, with whom she had a daughter, named
after her mother, Sara. Gradele died of heart failure and senility in a hospital
in Puyallup, WA, one of William Stoudt's boys, John, listed as the informant on her death certificate.
|
|
Discrepancies and addendum
1. In a letter to her mother Sara valued their coats and hats at $75 (inflation adjustment: $2.7k).
2. Sara's last name was spelled McCulloch but another popular spelling, McCullough,
sometimes appears.
The stated year of death, 1939, on Find-A-Grave is incorrect. See photo below of
1931 newspaper notice. One genealogy researcher asserts that Sara McCulloch never married
William Harding. but multiple newspaper reports and other sources (below) prove that she
and William at least lived together: According to the 1920 U.S. Census, in March
of that year Lieutenant William L. Harding from Waxahachie, Texas was married and living
in barrack housing at Pearl Harbor. A Honolulu city directory listed William as living
at 2011 Kalia Rd in Honolulu. Based on a January newspaper notice (below and
confirmation that she arrived in Honolulu in a Jan. 23, 1920 newspaper) Sara was living
somewhere in Honolulu but I don't know if the Kalia Rd. area was formerly military
housing. They sailed for California in January 1922.
Sara and/or William shaved a decade from her age on military forms.
3. To add a bit more confusion, though other sources reported the year of Grace's
birth as 1896, 1893 was reported on on her 1918 passport.
4.
A William High Harding and Sallie August McCulloch were active in the same period.
This story involves William LAWRENCE Harding and Sallie/Sara BASSET McCulloch.
5. In 1917 Charles was an officer in Sims Magneto Co. (1917–1924) that manufactured automotive
products and home lighting systems.
|
