Industry & Invention

Rio Vista, TX

Texas had been famed for beef since Republic days, and during the Civil War its herds fed much of the Confederacy—civilians and soldiers alike—along a web of trails running to Vicksburg, Natchez, Mobile, Little Rock, and beyond. Drovers swam cattle across rivers as wide as the Mississippi, and the hazards ran to mistaken arrests: one officer and his son died in prison on such a drive. Johnson County supplier Meredith Hart, a veteran of 1836, kept sending beef even after being cheated with counterfeit money.

Dublin, TX

Around 1880 Joseph E. Bishop — son-in-law of A.H. and Sarah Jane Dobkins, the founders of Dublin — put up this wooden commercial building, later veneered in native stone in 1895 and remodeled in the mid-20th century. Over the decades it housed a colorful parade of tenants: banks, medical clinics, a drugstore, a newspaper plant, saloons, and a dress shop.

Round Rock, TX

This limestone commercial building went up to house John A. Nelson's private bank alongside a hardware and lumber business — a common blend of enterprises in a growing central Texas town. Though the bank closed in 1922, commercial use continued, and the structure is prized for its facade of cast iron and pressed tin, whose ornamented pilasters and columns were fashionable in the region around the turn of the century. It is noted for keeping that storefront intact.

El Paso, TX

Before pipes and pumps, El Pasoans drew water from open acequias and bought it from aguadores who carried it door to door. In 1882 Sylvester Watts built the city's first waterworks, pumping from the Rio Grande into a reservoir on this site, and later a riverside well became the main supply. The city bought the system in 1910 and modernized it, and in 1952 the Public Service Board took over its stewardship.

Llano, TX

In 1756, under commission from the governor of Spanish Texas, Bernardo de Miranda led a party of 23 from San Antonio to examine Cerro del Almagre, a red-ochre hill rumored to be rich in silver. Reaching Honey Creek and the junction of the Llano and Colorado rivers, Miranda gathered ore that assayed at only ten ounces of silver per hundred pounds. That meager yield, combined with transport difficulties and the threat of Native raids, led Spain to abandon plans for further mining.

Corpus Christi, TX

Sheltered by offshore islands, Corpus Christi Bay drew smugglers before the Texas Revolution and then legitimate commerce when Henry Kinney opened a trading post around 1838. The town became a launching point for the California Gold Rush and a key stop between San Antonio and the Rio Grande, but its shallow harbor demanded decades of dredging. From the collapsed "Ropes Boom" of the 1890s to the port's grand opening in 1926, persistent effort turned a smugglers' haven into one of the nation's largest seaports.

McCamey, TX

In the 1920s this stretch of West Texas held what boosters called the world's largest complex of oil wells, and the problem was never finding oil but moving it. In 1925 the Humble company laid a roughly 500-mile pipeline to link the field to Gulf Coast refineries, and the construction camp built here in 1926 seeded the town of McCamey and its refinery. So much crude flowed that in 1928 the line took part in Texas's first voluntary proration, deliberately curbing output to match what could actually be shipped and sold.

Clay City, KY

Robert Clark Jr. and William Smith bought land here in 1805 to make iron, and from 1808 to 1830 a blast furnace known as the Red River Iron Works turned local ore into metal on the Kentucky frontier. Decades later the region's timber wealth took over: after the Kentucky Union Railway reached Powell County in 1886, Clay City's sawmills boomed, including one of America's largest timber-processing plants—until a 1906 mill fire and exhausted forests ended the boom.

Port Arthur, TX

When the Spindletop gusher blew in near Beaumont in January 1901, it did not just change Texas geology—it remade its ports. Within two months the tanker Atlas carried the first Spindletop crude out of Sabine Pass, and Port Arthur was soon shipping oil to Standard Oil's refineries even as skeptics scoffed at burning petroleum for fuel. Within a year more than half the ships entering the pass were tied to oil, steamers were burning Texas crude, and the Guffey company was building the state's first tanker fleet.

Titusville, PA · est. 1954

In the hills around Titusville, the modern petroleum industry was quite literally being invented. The inscription marks where one of the region's earliest crude-oil refineries rose in 1860, just after Edwin Drake's famous 1859 well nearby, with its first run of refined oil following in 1861. It also nods to Samuel Kier, who had been distilling Pennsylvania crude in Pittsburgh years earlier, turning a nuisance seepage into lamp oil and medicine.

Andrews, TX

Andrews County sat on one of Texas's last frontiers, where Anglo settlement lagged some sixty years behind the rest of the state because of Comanche resistance and a punishing scarcity of water. O. B. Holt filed the first land claim in 1886, and hardy families like the Cowdens and Peter Von Holebeke followed, but by 1900 the county still counted only 87 people and did not organize until 1910. Windmill pumps and drift fences finally made ranching workable on the dry plains, and the 1930 discovery of oil turned decades of stubborn endurance into sudden prosperity.

Kerrville, TX

Kentucky-born Joshua D. Brown came to Texas in 1830, did military duty for the Republic, and in 1846 led ten shingle makers to the cypress-rich headwaters of the Guadalupe, building a camp of picket houses to hand-rive shingles despite the danger of Indian raids. His shingle trade was the first industry on the site of Kerrville; Brown bought 2,640 acres, donated the townsite, and insisted the county be named for his friend, surveyor James Kerr.

Jefferson, TX

What started in 1854 as a humble log blacksmith shop in Jefferson grew into a bell foundry under G. A. Kelly, casting the cowbells that clanged from the ox teams of pioneer freighters. The shop went on to make the Kelly plow, one of the first modern plows manufactured in Texas. It was an early spark of Texas industry in a place better known for river commerce.

Columbus, TX

In the young Republic of Texas, a frontier town's first drugstore was a lifeline — the closest thing to a hospital many settlers would ever see. Founded in 1844 by Philadelphia-trained Dr. John G. Logue, this Columbus store dispensed medicine through the Republic, statehood, the Civil War, and the railroad age, passing through a long line of owners including one who founded the town's railway hospital. Its trade reached as far as Gonzales and Bastrop, and one proprietor stood behind the counter for nearly half a century.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth grew into a cattle supply depot in the 1870s as drovers pushed herds north, and railroad lines soon drew stockyards along their tracks. Boston investors bought the yards in 1893, and the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company held its first livestock show at Marine Creek in 1896, boosted by the Texas Cattle Raisers Association. With backing from Armour and Swift, the show grew into the National Feeders and Breeders Show, added a Wild West act in 1916, and by 1918 became the Southwestern Exposition and Fat Stock Show before relocating in 1944.

Sulphur Bluff, TX

The first known settlers at Sulphur Bluff were the family of John Gregg, whose cemetery holds a marker from the Republic of Texas era in 1837. The Hargrave brothers came from Indiana and built brush-roofed log homes on a high bluff above the Sulphur River, where game was plentiful and the height offered safety. Robert Hargrave, a mechanical talent, ran a woodworking shop, a blacksmith shop, and a grist mill that drew customers from fifty miles away; a post office followed in 1849 and a school in 1852.

Mount Joy Township, PA · est. 1947

Along this railroad right-of-way ran the first commercial telegraph line in the United States, strung between Lancaster and Harrisburg and completed in 1845 — barely a year after Samuel Morse's famous demonstration. The first message clattered through in January 1846 with a very human impatience: "Why don't you write, you rascals?" It was a small joke carrying an enormous idea — that words could now outrun the fastest horse.

Matagorda, TX

Before railroads reached Texas, everything a frontier settlement needed—flour, tools, munitions, trade goods—moved on the backs of ox and mule teams driven by teamsters who braved raids, bandits, and brutal weather. One of the few regular runs linked Austin and Matagorda, wagons rolling out on the 1st and 15th of each month across six counties. Loads grew from crude 15-foot wooden carts with prickly-pear-greased hubs to two-ton "Prairie Schooners," and caravans could stretch from five wagons to a hundred and fifty, circling into a defensive corral when attacked. The coming of the "Iron Horse" in 1853 began the freighter's slow disappearance.

Corsicana, TX

In 1902 the first public use of natural gas in Texas began on this Corsicana street, piping fuel to nearby homes and businesses. Navarro County became a cradle of the industry — the first gas meters appeared at Chatfield in 1905, and gas was first used to pump oil wells here in 1906. From these modest lines grew a network that within a generation spanned the state and, by the 1920s, launched the nation's first interstate natural gas pipelines.

Port Arthur, TX

This marks the route of Texas' first oil pipelines to tidewater, built in 1901 to carry crude from the famous Spindletop gusher that came in on January 10 of that year. A company that would become Gulf Pipeline laid eleven miles of line to the railroad in just two weeks, then extended it to Port Arthur, and within a few years the region was laced with hundreds of miles of pipe. The marker also recalls the wartime 'Big Inch' line from Texas to the Atlantic as a decisive factor in Allied victory in World War II.

Brenham, TX

In pioneer Texas, hopeful merchants tried to make the Brazos River a commercial highway, with Washington-on-the-Brazos as a key distribution point for the state's rich cotton and sugar country. The first steamer reached Washington in 1840, and by 1849 its docks bustled with boats bound for New Orleans. But shallow, flood-prone, driftwood-choked rivers doomed most such ventures, and by 1865 the era of Texas river steamers had passed.

San Augustine, TX

Texas lumbering, the state's first million-dollar industry, entered recorded history in 1819 with two sawmills, one of them run by pioneer William Ward on a creek in what is now San Augustine County. By 1825 a nearby mill was turning out about 500 board feet a day, cutting logs felled by ax and wedge and hauled by cart to the water. From primitive pit saws and animal-powered muley mills to the labor-saving sash saw, the craft advanced steadily and became a pivot for railroads and dozens of related trades in the Piney Woods.

Waco, TX

East Terrace was built in the 1870s by John W. Mann, a Waco business leader whose brickyard supplied much of the material for the famous Waco Suspension Bridge; Brazos River sand tinted the brick he made for his own Italian-villa home. His New York-born wife likely chose the fashionable styling, to which Texas-style galleries and Galveston millwork were added.

Fort Worth, TX

A block of native Trinity River stone here marks the dusty path that made Fort Worth. From the end of the Civil War until the railroad arrived in 1876, great herds of longhorns were driven up Rusk Street and across the river, resting in the valley below before the long push north to Abilene, Kansas. This route — the Eastern or McCoy Trail, which joined the Chisholm Trail at the Red River — earned Fort Worth its lasting nickname, 'Cow Town.'

Lawrence County, KY

This site became the railhead of the Eastern Kentucky Railway in 1889 when track from Willard completed a 36-mile line running from Riverton. The extension was built chiefly to carry out the forest products of the region, and a gasoline-powered car nicknamed the "Blue Goose" made two daily runs to Grayson. The line struggled financially and finally ended in bankruptcy in 1933.

Gloucester, MA

For more than three decades this bronze bell tolled through the fog at Eastern Point Light, warning mariners off the rocks at the entrance to Gloucester Harbor from 1933 until 1969. Cast in nearby Chelsea, Massachusetts, it was made with gold dust sprinkled into the mold to give it a truer tone. When electronic signals replaced it, the bell was preserved as a memento of the age of manned lighthouses.

Lovelady, TX

The Eastham family bought a nearly 13,000-acre plantation in Houston County in 1891 and soon leased it to the Texas prison system for share-farming, the landowner supplying tools and mules while convict labor worked the fields. The state bought the land outright in 1915 and made Eastham a hard-labor institution, building an early maximum-security unit in 1919 and using inmate labor to carve roads and a Trinity River ferry crossing. Decades later, penologist O. B. Ellis brought reforms — a library, chapel, and education program — that eased the farm's grim reputation.

Eastland, TX

Eastland took its name from William M. Eastland, a hero of the Texas War for Independence executed in the infamous 1842 "Black Bean" lottery after the Mier Expedition. Comanches long resisted settlement here, with the county's last recorded raid in 1874, and the town became county seat in 1875. A 1917 oil strike touched off one of Texas's fabled booms that swelled the population toward 25,000 and drew celebrities — and in 1928 the town made worldwide news when "Old Rip," a horned toad sealed in the old courthouse cornerstone in 1897, was found alive.

Eastland, TX

Eastland County was created in 1858 but sat so thinly settled that it was not organized until 1873, and its county seat bounced between Merriman, the new town of Eastland, and rival Cisco through a string of hard-fought elections. The Texas & Pacific Railway's arrival in 1880 spurred growth, and the oil and gas booms of the 1910s and 1920s bankrolled a grand Art Deco courthouse, opened in 1928 with carved eagles, shields, and a central tower. The building also gained fame as the home of "Old Rip," a horned toad legend said to have survived sealed in the previous courthouse cornerstone.

Hearne, TX

This burial ground adjoined the "Estate Place Plantation" of Ebenezer and Minerva Walker Hearne, part of a family that settled Robertson County in the 1850s and opened the cotton plantations that drove the area's early economy. Ebenezer, who died in 1869, lies here with Minerva, their daughter Icephena, and several children whose names went unrecorded. His brother Horatio's home stood a few miles south.

Mercedes, TX

Named for the clusters of ebony trees on its grounds, this shield-shaped cemetery began in 1922 when the American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company—developer of Mercedes and some 200 square miles of surrounding farmland—deeded nearly nine acres to the local cemetery association. Bounded on three sides by the Arroyo Colorado, it holds early reinterred graves of the Evans siblings and features stone slab covers and fraternal gravestones.

Foster Township, PA · est. 2015

Founded in 1854 as Fillmore and soon renamed for mining engineer Eckley Coxe, this village was built to house the workers who dug anthracite coal from the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania. Many were European immigrants, and their tight rows of company houses made Eckley a classic 'coal patch' town of the late 1800s. When the collieries faded by the 1950s the community nearly vanished, only to be preserved after it served as a filming location for the 1970 movie 'The Molly Maguires' and became a state historic site.

Penwell, TX

On December 28, 1926, a well drilled on W.E. Connell's land struck oil in Ector County, quietly opening the vast Permian Basin that lay beneath the West Texas plains. Its first-day yield of 38 barrels stirred little excitement, but geologists were certain of the riches below, and Robert Penn's 1929 gusher soon turned Odessa into a booming oil town. Petroleum has anchored the regional economy ever since, even though the discovery well itself was plugged and abandoned in 1940.

Odessa, TX

Odessa's newspaper history began in 1895, when William C. 'Uncle Billy' Griffin launched Ector County's first paper, the Weekly News. A string of short-lived weeklies followed until the late 1920s, when the papers that would become the Odessa American took shape through a series of mergers. Consolidated in 1940 and sold several times, the American outlasted its many competitors and has been published from this site since 1951.

Odessa, TX

In 1924, hopeful geologists and drillers probed the West Texas plains near Odessa for oil and potash, only to be stopped cold at 900 feet by unfamiliar "Red Bed" rock. Two costly attempts failed, but the gamble paid off in 1927 when a well came in just west of town, and soon oil was struck within yards of that first dry hole. By 1964 Ector County counted thousands of producing wells.

Moosic, PA

In the anthracite country of northeastern Pennsylvania, small towns like Moosic built much of their community life around the local ball diamond. This field is dedicated to Ed "Shovels" Kobesky, a Moosic native who made his career in minor league baseball as both a player and a manager. In the decades before television, clubs like the Redwings were the beating heart of a town's summer, drawing neighbors out to the bleachers on warm evenings.

Indianola, TX

Born near Leakey in 1905, David Edward "Ed" Bell settled at Indianola and opened a fish camp on Powderhorn Bayou that drew visitors as much for his tall tales as for the fishing. Over the decades his gift for a good yarn earned him a national reputation as a virtuoso storyteller who performed at events across the country. Locally he helped sustain Indianola's economy and, through his stories, kept alive the lore of the Texas coast.

Fort Worth, TX

Architect Howard Messer designed this ornate Victorian home in 1899 for Sarah C. Ball, widow of a Galveston banker. Fort Worth banker William Eddleman bought it in 1904 and later gave it to his daughter Carrie, wife of cattleman Frank McFarland, who lived here for seventy-five years. Its marble, sandstone, brick, and copper exterior and finely crafted woodwork survive largely intact.

Waxahachie, TX

Eddy Pennell Hawkins, of a pioneer Ellis County family, built the first two rooms of this Waxahachie home soon after marrying Netta Lewis Carson in 1878. By 1900, prosperous and prominent, he expanded it into a three-story Late Victorian residence blending Queen Anne and Shingle-style influences, with beveled glass and neoclassical porch details. The house mirrors the confidence and wealth of a rising Gilded Age businessman in the North Texas cotton country.

Eddystone, PA · est. 2019

When the guns of the First World War fell on Europe in 1914, an arms plant rose on the Delaware River at Eddystone to turn out Enfield rifles for Britain. After the United States entered the war, the factory retooled to make the American Model 1917 — and became the single largest rifle producer in the nation, employing some 15,000 workers, a fifth of them women. Its lines fabricated more than a million rifles, nearly half of the country's entire wartime output.

Ogden Valley, UT

This cluster of plaques and a sculpture in Utah's Ogden Valley layers the area's history: the long Native American use of the valley, the founding of the town of Eden by early Latter-day Saint settlers, and the life of David Eccles (1849–1912), an immigrant boy who rose to become a lumber, sugar, and banking magnate and Utah's first multimillionaire. Together they trace the valley from Indigenous homeland to pioneer settlement to industrial fortune.

New Braunfels, TX

After earning his veterinary degree from Texas A&M in 1937, Dr. Edgar Alfred Grist (1915–1994) became the first licensed veterinarian in Comal County, riding out to farms to teach disease prevention and good animal nutrition. As Texas State Veterinarian and city meat inspector he cracked down on unsanitary slaughterhouses and battled rabies and anthrax outbreaks. Inspired by his son's letters from German festivals, he launched the sausage-and-beer celebration that became New Braunfels's beloved Wurstfest.

Luling, TX

Edgar B. Davis came to Luling after careers in Massachusetts shoe manufacturing and overseas rubber planting, and in 1922 his wildcat gamble brought in the Luling Oil Field — 215 producing wells by 1926. Rather than simply pocketing the fortune, he handed his employees $2,500,000 in bonuses and endowed the Luling Foundation to advance agriculture and opportunity in the area. Its work in soil conservation and crop and livestock improvement carried his vision forward, and he remained in the community until his death.

Bryan, TX

Completed in 1925 for the family of prominent Bryan merchant Eugene Edge, this two-and-a-half story brick home is a textbook example of the Georgian Revival style, with a symmetrical facade, Doric-columned portico, stone quoins, and gabled dormers. It remained in the Edge family for more than half a century, until 1978.

Akron, OH

Before Thomas Edison married Mina Miller in 1886, he courted her at the Akron home of her father, the inventor and Chautauqua co-founder Lewis Miller. Local tradition holds that Edison — ever the electrician — erected a light pole on the premises during the courtship. It is a charming reminder that the world's most famous inventor was also a suitor who couldn't resist showing off his craft.

Baltimore, MD

The Hamilton sisters each left a lasting mark. Edith Hamilton became one of America's most beloved interpreters of the ancient world as author of The Greek Way, while her sister Alice Hamilton essentially founded the field of industrial medicine, exposing the dangers of lead and other toxins to American workers.

San Saba, TX

In the hill country of San Saba, Edmond E. Risien turned the wild native pecan into a cultivated crop. An English immigrant who arrived in the 1870s, he spent decades selecting and improving San Saba's pecans, developing named varieties that helped make the pecan a commercial industry — work later recognized by the Texas Legislature. His son E. Guy carried the effort forward.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2006

Edmund N. Bacon led Philadelphia's city planning from 1949 to 1970, the postwar decades when American cities were remaking themselves for a new age. His vision reshaped the fabric of a colonial-era city, restoring the historic townhouses of Society Hill while opening modern civic spaces like Penn Center and the beloved LOVE Park. Time magazine put him on its cover as the face of a national urban-renewal movement.

Houston, TX

Local lumber manager James Carroll built this home in Houston's Avondale neighborhood in 1913, and after passing through several hands the Jacksons bought it in 1918 and kept it in the family until 1970. It is a fine example of early-20th-century Craftsman design, with scalloped roof cresting, twin Palladian windows on a symmetrical façade, ornamental knee brackets, and pine floors and millwork inside.

Washington, PA · est. 1953

Edward Goodrich Acheson was born in this distinctive round-cornered house in 1856 and went on to become one of America's most inventive industrial chemists. Working with the intense heat of the electric furnace, he discovered carborundum—an abrasive nearly as hard as diamond—and a method for producing artificial graphite, both of which won him medals and reshaped modern manufacturing. His inventions became indispensable to grinding, machining, and electrical industries worldwide.

Fredericksburg, TX

Edward Stein — a skilled craftsman, prominent Fredericksburg banker, and architect of many local buildings — designed and built this home for himself and his wife Minnie in 1923. A fine example of a 1920s Craftsman bungalow, it shows wide overhanging eaves with brackets, intersecting gables, and carefully detailed walls and porches, and it remained in the Stein family until 1978.

Baltimore, MD

Edward J. Gallagher (1864–1933) came of age as Baltimore was booming outward from its old harbor core, and the phrase "Pioneer Builder" marks him as one of the developers who gave the city its signature look: block after block of brick and Formstone rowhouses with marble stoops. In the decades around the turn of the century, builders like Gallagher raised whole neighborhoods of affordable, ground-rent homes that housed the city's growing working and middle classes. A memorial like this honors not a single dramatic event but a lifetime of quiet, cumulative work that literally shaped the streets Baltimoreans still live on.

Springfield Township, PA · est. 2025

Edward Piszek co-founded Mrs. Paul's Kitchens in Philadelphia in 1946, and his frozen seafood—especially the fish cakes that earned him the nickname "Fishcake King"—soon filled freezers across the country. A trip to his family's Polish homeland in the 1960s turned him into a devoted patron of Polish culture and causes. He founded the Copernicus Society, helped save the Kosciuszko House with historian Edward Pinkowski, and bankrolled an anti-tuberculosis campaign.

Houston, TX

Edward Ruthven Taylor, born in 1845, came of age in a Houston cotton and education family and returned from schooling in New York to fight for the Confederacy, serving with Waul's Texas Legion at Vicksburg, where he was captured and fell ill. Back home he fell in love with Ann, a young woman his family had enslaved; unable to marry legally, the couple built a farm at Pierce Junction and raised a large family together. Ann died in 1909, and when oil was struck on the family land in 1921, the fortune passed to their children, who later donated the original homestead to the City of Houston.

Monterey, CA

This memorial on the Monterey waterfront honors Edward Ricketts, the pioneering marine biologist whose Pacific Biological Laboratories anchored Cannery Row in the early twentieth century. A close friend of John Steinbeck, Ricketts helped shape ecological thinking about tide pools and coastal life and was immortalized as the character "Doc" in Steinbeck's fiction. He died in 1948 when a train struck his car near this spot.

Rocksprings, TX

Spread across the Edwards Plateau and dipping into the scenic Nueces Valley, Edwards County was created in 1858 and organized in 1883 from the old Bexar district, taking its name from early Texas colonizer Haden Edwards. Ranching built its economy, and it once styled itself the Angora goat capital of the world. The county seat moved to Rocksprings in 1891, whose courthouse survived a fire in 1897 and, in 1927, a devastating tornado that killed 72 people.

Edwardsville, IL

First raised in 1923 at the busy corner of St. Louis and North Main streets, this bank clock kept time over downtown Edwardsville through the automobile age's early decades. When redevelopment threatened it, residents pooled donations to move the timepiece into its own small park and hand it to the city — a grassroots act of preservation. It survives as a civic keepsake of a prospering county-seat Main Street.

Houston, TX

This two-and-a-half-story brick Tudor Revival residence was designed in 1914 by Houston architect Birdsall P. Briscoe, and it still keeps its original floor plan, half-timbered gables, steep hipped roof, and one-story brick loggias. It was home to Edwin L. Neville, a partner at Dorrance & Company, and his wife Daphne Palmer, both active in Houston civic life through the Community Chest, the Junior League, and area hospitals and chapels. The house stayed in the Neville family until 1949.

Cambridge, MA

This Cambridge tribute honors Dr. Edwin Herbert Land (1909–1991), the inventor and entrepreneur whose experiments with light and polarization led to the Polaroid Corporation and the instant camera that made a photograph appear in seconds. A largely self-taught scientist, he held hundreds of patents and advised the nation on science and defense, earning the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His maxims — undertake only what is 'manifestly important or nearly impossible' — capture a restless, world-changing curiosity.

Oil Creek Township, PA · est. 1946

Edwin L. Drake drilled the world's first commercially successful oil well near Titusville in 1859, proving that petroleum could be pumped from underground in quantity and igniting the modern oil industry. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery beneath sculptor Charles Niehaus's bronze figure "The Driller," and the site of his pioneering well is preserved today as a state park a mile and a half south of town. The valley he opened became the cradle of a global energy business.