|
William Perry Herring
McFaddin, cattleman and capitalist, son of Rachel (Williams) and
William McFaddin,qv
was born in Beaumont, Texas, on February 5, 1856. He attended
Texas Military Instituteqv at
Austin for one year and also took a business course in St.
Louis, Missouri. He entered the cattle-raising business with his
father and at twenty-two started to acquire land with his first
purchase of 4,428 acres. His ranching interests at their largest
extent comprised approximately 120,000 acres in Jefferson County
and 48,000 acres in Knox and King counties. With his father,
Obadiah Kyle, and Valentine Wiess, he formed several
companies-land, rice-milling, canal and irrigation, and oil-of
which he was the managing partner. Arthur Edward Stilwellqv
bought the townsite for Port Arthur from the McFaddin's Beaumont
Pasture Company, and it was on land leased from the McFaddins
that Anthony F. Lucasqv
drilled the Lucas Gusher, the discovery well of the Spindletop
oilfield.qv The McFaddins'
canal and irrigation company built thirty miles of canals and a
200,000-gallon capacity pumping plant. The system, capable of
watering up to 18,000 acres of land, facilitated the first
large-scale rice-growing in the area. McFaddin diversified his
family's holdings, doubling them in the process. He built
downtown office buildings in Beaumont, bought the Crosby Hotel,
famous during the Spindletop boom, started a cattle-feeding and
meat-packing operation, and started one of the South's largest
muskrat farms, producing over 200,000 pelts a year. He
participated in early cattle drives to Louisiana and later
shipped by rail to Kansas City. The McFaddin family was one of
the first to bring Brahman cattleqv
into Texas. McFaddin was vice president of the First National
Bank of Beaumont, vice president of the Beatty Oil Company, a
director of the J. M. Guffey Petroleum Company, and a director
of the Beaumont Board of Trade and Oil Exchange. In 1928 his
holdings were placed in the McFaddin Trust, managed by his sons,
W. P. H. McFaddin, Jr., and J. L. C. McFaddin. McFaddin married
Emma Janes of Beaumont, with whom he had three children; after
her death he married Ida Regina Caldwell (see
MCFADDIN, IDA) of Huntington, West Virginia, with whom he had
three more children. He died on November 6, 1935.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ellis A.
Davis and Edwin H. Grobe, comps.,
The New Encyclopedia of Texas (2
vols., 1925?). Judith Walker Linsley and Ellen Walker Rienstra,
Beaumont: A Chronicle of Promise
(Woodland Hills, California: Windsor, 1982). William P. H.
McFaddin Papers, McFaddin-Ward House Museum, Beaumont.
Rosine McFaddin Wilson
-
- Present
-
|
