Digging through the crates, Murray resident Vicky Ferguson combed and dusted through dozens of yearbooks, pictures and personal letters to ensure a long-awaited project honoring her grandfather, Earl Ferguson, the Box Elder and Utah high school football coach of 39 years, would stand the test of time long after she’s gone.

More than half a century after he died in 1971, Coach Ferguson and his story live on at the Brigham City Museum through the end of September with the help of his granddaughter and extended family, collaborating with the museum to assemble a unique look into a life dedicated to Box Elder and its surrounding community. Also known as the “Dean of High School Coaches,” Coach Ferguson amassed a record 213 wins, a record that stood for 29 years at Box Elder, where the field bears his name.

Coach Ferguson’s 213-39 career mark remains the seventh-best record in the state.

“He basically was able to take a team that nobody had heard about and make it great,” museum curator Jennifer Hill said.

Photo supplied, Vicky Perry

“… He seemed like he was a builder of men. A lot of the letters to him, he had letters written to him when he retired, from all over the country. From people who became lawyers and doctors… They all kind of said the same thing: that what he taught them, they were able to continue using in their everyday lives to become better people.”

Coach Ferguson raised three children – two boys and a daughter – who followed in the family football tradition in one way or another. Vicky’s father, Warren, attended and played at the University of Utah just like his father; Her aunt, Renee, later studied at the U and became a doctor. Picking up some of those football genes, Vicky would surprise her physical education class with quite the throwing arm in grade school.

Piecing together the past

A historical account of Coach Ferguson, taking a small community off the western slopes of the Wellsville Mountains to six state football titles, started with the smallest of modern-day technological advances: a thumb drive.

Vicky, compiling photos of her grandfather onto the drive from her computer, provided the museum with the concept a few years ago, but this year’s Brigham Peach Days celebration, a two-day festival created in 1904 to give farmers a much-deserved break from harvest, will include the Coach Ferguson exhibit as part of the city’s annual homecoming weekend.

The stories live in photographs, yearbooks, and other printed copies preserving a bygone era around Box Elder and Brigham City, approaching just under 11,000 residents in 1957. First came the photos, then the yearbooks: dozens of them.

Photo supplied, Vicky Perry

Just shy of four decades coaching football, basketball, track and swim at Box Elder, Coach Ferguson received seemingly endless blurbs and comments from pen pals all over the country. One letter, Hill said, was written directly from Boyd K. Packard, a fellow Brigham City native and president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 2008 until he died in 2015.

Her grandfather had a real rapport in the community, and Vicky learns more about her grandfather by preserving her family’s chapter of Utah history every day.

“It’s been so much fun to read the different comments that people have written,” Perry said. “… (Earl) actually sang in the quartet at the U, which I didn’t know until I started reading and was like, ‘What?’ It’s funny how you don’t know – you just know grandpa had his beautiful garden, and he’d play with us and those things you know as a child. Then you find out all these sorts of things, and it’s like, woah.”

After developing a correspondence with the museum, Vicky soon found herself mulling over boxes of treasures of Coach Ferguson’s past. Those artifacts – yearbooks, letters, trophies, clothes and more – all carried the potential to help tell his story.

“I knew they had limited space and they had to pick and choose,” Perry said. “It’s mostly back-and-forth because I don’t live in town. Texts, phone calls, that kind of stuff, but we started with me trying to figure out what to do with yearbooks… They first took the yearbooks, so I delivered those, and from there it was like, I have all this other stuff.”

Photo supplied, Vicky Perry

Over the last year, Vicky became something of a novice historian.

“I mean, how do you preserve a leather jacket?” Perry said. “The (museum) gave me information on keeping things protected. I have programs from different games, and they need to go in the right plastic so as not to be destroyed. That was helpful to me as someone who’s trying to save a lot of these things.”

See the exhibit this month

The exhibit honoring Coach Ferguson’s legacy is on display at the Brigham City Museum through the end of September.

The museum, located at 24 North 300 West in Brigham City, offers on-site tours, including a look into the city’s Pioneer history and the Shoshone occupations around the area. Admission is free to the public, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For more museum information, visit www.museum.bcutah.gov.

Connect with Standard-Examiner sports reporter Conner Becker via email at cbecker@standard.net, X @ctbecker and Instagram @standardexaminersports.