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is a city in Otter Tail County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 13,471 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Otter Tail County.
The falls from which the city gets part of its name were discovered by Joe Whitford (a Scottish trapper) in 1856 and which was promptly named in honor of his employer, James Fergus (the other part of the city's name). It is not known whether James Fergus ever visited this namesake city, but Joe Whitford did not live to see the city develop, as he became one of the many victims of the 1862 Sioux uprising in western Minnesota. In 1867, George B. Wright was at the land office at St. Cloud and found Whitford's lapsed claim, purchased the land, and built what is now the Central Dam in downtown Fergus Falls around 1871. After George's passing in 1882, his son Vernon would move from Boston to Minnesota and take over his father's interests in town. Vern Wright would also be one of the two people who established the Otter Tail Power Company in 1907. The city was incorporated in the late 1870s and is situated along the dividing line between the former great deciduous forest of the Northwest Territories to the East, and the great plains to the West, in a region of gentle hills, where the recent geological history is dominated by the recession of the glaciers from the last great Ice Age, with numerous lakes and small rivers about.