Frank Neal Drane

Drane's foundation was built around matching grants. A Navarro County biography says the Navarro Community Foundation began on May 28, 1938 as an unincorporated public charitable trust with about $800,000 pledged, for six purposes: religion, education, relief of suffering and disease, public buildings, aid to the worthy poor, and science. It gave roughly $4 million from 1938 through 1976. The same biography says Drane helped form the Texas Electric Railway, an interurban linking Corsicana, Dallas and Waco, and ran Arcady Farms, a 200-acre dairy estate.

What the plaque says

Frank Neal Drane (1862-1938) A Navarro County native, Frank Neal Drane married Florence A. Bingham in 1885 and had two children. He ran a hardware store with his father before becoming president of City National Bank. In 1901 Drane formed the Corsicana Power and Light company. A city alderman and a leader in the Third Avenue Presbyterian church, he wished to share his personal prosperity with fellow citizens. In 1938 he organized the Navarro Community Foundation with E. W. Robinson (1891-1967) as the first director. The fund has benefited wide-ranging endeavors, including Navarro College, founded in 1946. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petroleum Industry Park — 0.8 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 20 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 30 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.

More markers nearby

• Colonel Roger Q. Mills — steps away
• Joseph S. Cullinan, Pioneer in Texas Oil — 0.2 mi
• David Reed Mitchell — 0.2 mi
• Col. Clinton McKamey Winkler — 0.2 mi