Brewster Ferrel now occupies an attractive home at 336 South Palouse street in Walla Walla, where he is surrounded with all of the comforts and many of the luxuries of life. For many years he was prominently and actively identified with farming, taking up that work in Walla Walla county in early pioneer times and meeting with all of the hardships and privations which were incident to the settlement of the frontier. He was born in Trumbull county, Ohio, August 22, 1838, a son of Edward and Rosella (Fish) Ferrel, the former a native of Pennsylvania, while the latter was born in Ohio. They were married in the Buckeye state and in 1854 removed to Iowa, where both resided up to the time of their death.
Brewster Ferrel was a lad of sixteen years when his father removed to Iowa and in the public schools of that state he supplemented the educational training which he had already received in Ohio. He was trained to farm work, early becoming familiar with the tasks of plowing, planting and harvesting, and he early developed habits of industry and perseverance which later constituted very important elements in the attainment of his present-day success.
In 1861, Brewster Ferrel was united in marriage in Iowa to Miss Caroline Bott, a native of Muskingum county, Ohio, whose parents had removed to Iowa when she was a little maiden of ten summers. The young couple began their domestic life in the middle west but in 1864 left their Iowa home and started across the plains with a team of mules and a prairie schooner. They joined a wagon train and, traveling after the slow and tedious method of that period, at length arrived in Walla Walla on the 3d of August, 1864. For some time after reaching the northwest Mr. Ferrel, like many other of the pioneers, engaged in freighting and continued in that business up to the advent of the railroad, when freighting by team was no longer profitable. He then concentrated his energies upon farming. It was in 1864 that he had homesteaded and secured the farm property which he still owns. The first year after his arrival there was little wheat raised and so great was the demand for it in the mining regions of the Rocky Mountains that he sold all he had for a dollar and a quarter per bushel, which was considered a very high price in that day. The following year, however, the eastern demand fell off and the farmers were obliged to market their product in Portland, where the wheat brought only sixty cents per bushel. Stock could be ranged easily in the mountains and for a time Mr. Ferrel engaged in raising stock, driving his cattle to the different mining camps, where he would sell them. Eventually, however, he disposed of his live stock interests entirely. To his original farm of two hundred acres he gradually added four hundred acres and finally more and more, paying for his last tract a hundred dollars per acre--a tract that could have been bought at the time of his arrival for a dollar and a quarter per acre. Mr. Ferrel has always been actuated by a spirit of enterprise and progressiveness in anything that he has undertaken. He was among the first to build a barbed wire fence in Walla Walla county. Up to this time he had hauled rails from the mountains and tied them to posts by means of rawhide, thus using the otherwise useless hides to help fence his crops from the ranging herds. For the first barbed wire he paid eighteen cents per pound and it was a very crude article compared to that manufactured at the present time at that. The most improved farm machine was the old McCormick reaper, bearing little resemblance to the binders and headers of the present time. Mr. Ferrel even cradled large portions of his wheat crop in those early years and all the farmers would unite to harvest and thresh. At that day many believed that the Walla Walla valley would be abandoned as soon as the mines to the eastward were exhausted and many refused to take up land and settle. At times Mr. Ferrel may have become discouraged but with stout heart he pressed on and his diligence and determination have at length secured a substantial reward. His crops today bring ten per cent on an investment rated at one hundred dollars per acre and he and his sons have built up a grain growing business that is as carefully, methodically and successfully managed as any mercantile establishment. The old homestead is located on Russell creek, about eight miles east of Walla Walla, and thereon Mr. Ferrel resided until 1902, when he took up his abode in the city, where he has one of the most handsome homes to be found in southeastern Washington.