Ferguson Home

🏛️The era

When this house was built in 1907, Temple was a young, ambitious railroad town in the farmland of Central Texas. It had grown up around the railroad in the 1880s, and in the early twentieth century it was a busy commercial hub for the cotton farmers of Bell County and beyond.

It was a time of ferment in Texas politics. The Progressive Era was reshaping the country, and debates raged over Prohibition, the plight of tenant farmers, schools and roads. Women did not yet have the vote nationally; that would come only with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Within a few years, the couple who lived in this house would be at the center of nearly every one of these fights.

Roads in particular were a growing concern. Automobiles were arriving faster than Texas could build anything to drive them on, and the state created its Highway Department in 1917, during the Ferguson era. As the marker notes, highways and public schools became major priorities in the years the Fergusons held power.

👥People & events

James E. Ferguson, a Temple banker and businessman, burst onto the statewide stage in 1914, campaigning as 'Farmer Jim', champion of the state's tenant farmers. He won the governorship that year and again in 1916. But his second term ended in scandal: in 1917 he was impeached and removed from office amid charges that included the misuse of state funds and a bitter fight with the University of Texas, and he was barred from holding state office again.

That might have ended the Ferguson story, but it did not. In 1924, Miriam A. Ferguson ran for governor herself, and won. Her campaign became famous for the slogan 'Me for Ma', and it was widely understood that Jim would remain a powerful voice in her administration. She took office in January 1925, and would win the governorship a second time in 1932.

The marker calls Mrs. Ferguson the first woman elected governor of any state, and this is a point where history is genuinely close. On the same day in November 1924, Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming also won a governor's race, and Ross was inaugurated a few weeks earlier, so Ross is generally credited as the first woman to serve as a state governor. Either way, the two women broke the barrier together.

This house was the family home before Jim's first term began in 1915, and again from 1917 until Miriam's inauguration in 1925. In other words, it was here, in the years after Jim's fall, that the family regrouped and plotted its remarkable return to power.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Miriam Ferguson's election in 1924 came just four years after American women won the right to vote nationally. That a woman could be elected to lead one of the largest states so soon afterward was a striking milestone, even if critics at the time argued that she was standing in for her husband. Historians still debate how much independent power she wielded, but her place in the history of women in American politics is secure.

The Fergusons also stand for something larger in American political life: the power of a populist appeal to rural voters, and the controversies that often came with it. Their careers mixed real attention to farmers, schools and roads with charges of cronyism and scandal, and their story is a vivid chapter in the long tug-of-war between reform and machine politics in the twentieth century.

And then there are the roads. The rise of a state highway system in the Ferguson years was part of a nationwide transformation, as the automobile remade how Americans lived, worked and travelled. Every road trip across Texas today rides on that change.

🧭If you visit

The Ferguson Home is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in Temple. It is a good idea to treat it as you would any historic house in a residential setting: view it from the street and respect the privacy of whoever lives or works there now.

As you look at it, try to picture the household it sheltered. Here was a family that had tasted power, lost it in disgrace, and was preparing to stage one of the most unlikely comebacks in American political history. A building this ordinary-looking makes a surprising stage for a story that ended in the governor's mansion.

Temple sits right along the main highway corridor between Dallas and Austin, which makes this an easy detour. The city's railroad heritage is a natural pairing for the stop, and for anyone interested in women's history or Texas politics, the house makes a fine bookend to a visit to the State Capitol in Austin, where both Fergusons governed.