pastorate at Roanoke, Illinois. Five years later he was ordained in the Episcopal church, serving at Hudson, Wisconsin, and from there he served in the Church of the Messiah at St. Paul, Minnesota, for thirty-five years. He was commissioner of education in St. Paul for two terms, remodeling forty-five schools and building fourteen new ones.

During World War I he became an overseas Chaplain, and for a time was head of all overseas religious services in the army. Following his discharge, he served pastorates in Lead and Huron in South Dakota. Since 1944 he has been Rector, St. John's Episcopal Church in Deadwood, South Dakota, completing his fiftieth year in the Episcopal Church. He still finds time for civic affairs, and has just completed a term as president of the Deadwood Rotary Club.

One of the men who helped make the country surrounding El Paso what it is today was Elias S. Fursman, who came to Panola Township about 1865, when he sold some Livingston County land and purchased forty acres two miles north of El Paso. With this modest acreage as a nucleus, this progressive farmer eventually owned the quarter section.

Fursman was born in New York State, August 16, 1837, the son of William and Christine Fursman, who were of English ancestry. He came to Bloomington in 1855 and clerked for two years in a store. It was his fruit and nursery business that directed attention to Elias Fursman after he settled the forty acre farm. There was great need for beautifying the prairie farms with fruit and shade trees, such as he produced. He then pioneered in tile manufacturing, forming the company which dug the old El Paso tile pits on the southeast side of town, only recently filled in. In 1874 he was state agent for the scrapers pulled by horses and an ingenious implement used in making the open ditches needed to drain prairie ponds and sloughs. He and L. S. Straight began the making of brick where the greenhouse now stands, and in 1887 he constructed several of the brick buildings on Front Street, and that east side block was thereafter called the "Fursman" block.

His interest in agriculture and the development of farmland never waned, and in 1880 he had much to do with the creation of the Woodford County Agricultural Board, and for twenty years served as an officer and director. When the Illinois State Fair was held in Peoria in 1892, Fursman was given sole charge of the Woodford County agricultural exhibit and it won first prize in the northern Illinois division.

A few of our real old timers can recall the Illinois agricultural exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 on the Jackson Park grounds under a great dome, an immense mural depicting how a typical Illinois farmstead looked. That mural, frame and all, was made of grasses and grains grown on farms in El Paso and Panola Townships. The Chicago Inter-Ocean called this display "wonderfully picturesque and artistic." It must have been, for the minutely detailed mural was thereafter taken to the Paris, France, Exposition.

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