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The Texas State Handbook Online:
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/MM/fmc48.html
MCFADDIN, WILLIAM PERRY HERRING (1856-1935). William Perry Herring McFaddin, cattleman and capitalist, son of Rachel (Williams) and William McFaddin, was born in Beaumont, Texas, on February 5, 1856. He attended Texas Military Institute 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 Stilwell bought the town site for Port Arthur from the McFaddin's Beaumont Pasture Company, and it was on land leased from the McFaddins that Anthony F. Lucas drilled the Lucas Gusher, the discovery well of the Spindletop oilfield. 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 cattle 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
William Perry Herring McFaddin was like his father and older brother in that he possessed great energy and enterprise which he channeled into productive activities. Known formally as W.P.H. McFaddin, informally as Perry, he was educated privately at home and at Texas Military Institute in Austin; he then attended a business college in St. Louis. Upon his return, he entered the cattle business with his father who had reared him by his own cardinal principles of success. An apt pupil, who was bold and innovative, he realized early in his career that land, cheap and plentiful, was an investment certain of [appreciation] and a capital that would never be entirely eroded no matter what the circumstances.
With his father and three [family] associates, he organized the Beaumont Pasture Company that purchased large tracts of land on the coastal prairies of Jefferson county [on which to raise cattle]. In [January 1901] some of these lands were under lease to Captain Anthony Lucas and became a part of the Spindletop oil discovery, an event that introduced a new dimension into the life of the cattle company, [as well as] Beaumont, Jefferson county, and, indeed, the rest of the world [as it ushered in the modern oil industry].
[He and family business] associates experimented also with rice [farming]. They built a canal system and a rice mill that were the largest of their kind at that time. Still a cattleman, he maintained a large feeding lot near the city, and 'McFaddin steaks' were sold as far away as New York. Later he introduced fur-farming, using muskrats of the Gulf Coast as the source of his pelts, and "McFaddin furs" appeared on the London market." Source: More Early Southeast Texas Families, Madeleine Martin, Nortex Press (1998). [email David McFadden, 21 Jul 2000]
Their house is a historical landmark in Beaumont, Texas.
http://www.mcfaddin-ward.org/
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1856 - 1935 (79 years)
