Edgar B. Davis, Oil Pioneer-Philanthropist

With only a high school education, Davis made his first million in shoes about 1905 and another fortune in rubber, becoming the largest individual stockholder in the United States Rubber Company. He came to Luling in 1919 to manage his brother Oscar's oil leases, believing God had sent him to free the county from cotton. Geologists said there was no oil. When he sold his leases to Magnolia in 1926 for $12 million, he threw a free barbecue attended by 15,000 to 35,000 people. He also kept a friend's play, The Ladder, running on Broadway for two years.

What the plaque says

Edgar B. Davis, Oil Pioneer-Philanthropist (Feb. 2, 1872 - Oct. 14, 1951) One of the great benefactors of Texas. Born in Brockton, Mass. Had business careers in shoe manufacture and rubber planting. On retirement, came here and in wildcat operation brought in Luling Oil Field, 1922. By 1926 had 215 producing wells. Gave employees $2,500,000 in bonuses, then endowed Luling Foundation, for advancement of agriculture and human opportunity in area. Result has been conservation of land, upbreeding of crops and livestock and introduction and marketing of superior products. Davis remained in this area and is buried near Luling. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 14 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 22 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Gruene Historic District — 28 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.

More markers nearby

• City of Luling — 0.2 mi
• Episcopal Church of the Annunciation — 0.4 mi
• Rosenwald School — 0.5 mi
• Zedler's Mills — 1.1 mi