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Biographical History of Cherokee County, Iowa
W. S. Dunbar & Co., Chigago - 1889

[page 424-425]

   REV. WALTER L. FERRIS, the present pastor of the Congregational
   Church of Cherokee, Iowa, was born at Oneida, Knox County, Illinois,
   July 31, 1852, and is a son of LyMAN B. and HARRIET A. (NEWCOMB)
   FERRIS, who were among the early settlers of that county.  He was
   reared to farm life, and till the age of twenty-one years he worked
   for the neighboring farmers by the day and month, attending the Oneida
   public schools in the winter.  It was not until he had attained his
   majority that he entered Wheaton College; there he found himself all
   but penniless, but he was filled with an intense desire to do some-
   thing in the world, and he set to work with a fixed determination to
   go through at all hazards.  His hardy farm life here came in play; he
   plowed and husked corn, trimmed hedges, sawed wood, did anything to
   earn the fifteen cents an hour paid the students for their labor. In
   June 1879 he graduated in the regular classical course of this insti-
   tution. The following eight months he supplied the pulpit of the
   Congregational Church of Wataga, Illinois, teaching at the same time
   a district school near by called the "Hard Scrabble School," and justly
   reputed one of the most difficult to control. In September, 1880, Mr.
   FERRIS began a course of theological studies at Union Park Theological
   Seminary, Chicago.  The first years of his seminary course he filled
   the pulpit of the Congregational Church at Prospect Park, Illinois.
   Then for a year and a half he was pastor of the Northwest Branch of
   the First Congregational Church of Chicago.  All the while he was
   learning the practical with the theological. At the close of his three
   years' seminary course he was called to the pastorate of the Congre-
   gational Church of Dundee, Illinois. This he considered his first
   permanent work.  Though his labors had been blessed for nearly four
   years he could now feel that at last the time had come when he could
   devote all his time to his chosen calling. He spent over six years at
   Dundee, and the church was blessed with several revivals; during this
   pastorate 130 united with the church, many of them being heads of
   families.  In May of 1889 Mr. FERRIS received a call from the church
   in Cherokee, and began work here the first Sabbath in July, 1889.
   He has ever been a radical temperance worker; while at Dundee he was
   repeatedly called to speak to the various Prohibition clubs, and other
   temperance organizations in the towns about him. He is a man of deepest
   sincerity and exceeding earnestness of purpose and begins the work in
   his present field with very encouraging prospects.  The congregations
   are large, the membership united; the Sabbath-school is prosperous;
   the outlook seems propitious.  Mr. FERRIS was untied in marriage
   August 9, 1882, to Miss HARRIET McEWEN, daughter of EZRA and MARY
   McEWEN. Two children were born of this union, MILLIE and HATTIE.
   Mrs. FERRIS was called from this earth September 26, 1887.

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