Industry & Invention

Marble Falls, TX

A few miles from this marker rises Granite Mountain, the source of the distinctive pink granite quarried to build the Texas State Capitol. Constructed from 1885 to 1888, that capitol was second in size only to the United States Capitol. The stone was paid for in a remarkable barter — three million acres of state land traded for the building's construction.

Marble Falls, TX

Granite Mountain is an 866-foot dome of solid pink granite—molten rock that cooled deep underground into crystals of quartz and feldspar eons ago—and today the site of one of the largest granite quarries in the United States. Its fame was sealed in 1885 when, amid a dispute over building stone for the new Texas Capitol, Governor John Ireland resisted pressure to use imported limestone, and the quarry owners donated their native pink granite to the state. A special rail spur was built to haul the stone to Burnet, and the granite went on to face the Capitol, the Galveston sea wall, and monuments across the world.

Baltimore County, MD

For more than a century the village of Granite—first called Waltersville after the family that opened the industry around 1820—shipped some of North America's finest building stone. Its Waltersville and Fox Rock quarries employed hundreds of stonecutters whose granite went into the Baltimore & Ohio's pioneering railroad, the Thomas Viaduct, and landmark buildings including the Library of Congress and the inner walls of the Washington Monument. The workers' homes still cluster nearby, and the district was placed on the National Register in 1994.

Monroe Township, OH

This cast-iron nameplate is a surviving relic of the original Grant Memorial Bridge, a steel truss span erected between 1925 and 1927 during the great era of American road-building, when reinforced steel and concrete were replacing the wooden and iron crossings of the previous century. The bridge carried its name in honor of Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general and president who was born just a short distance away at Point Pleasant in Clermont County. When the original structure was eventually retired, this nameplate — one of two — was preserved and set into the walkway so that travelers could still touch a piece of the old bridge.

Moran, TX

Ohio-born Granville Eades Waters came to Texas in 1871 and settled in Shackelford County, where he and his wife raised five sons amid the hardships of frontier life—the nearest post office days away at Fort Griffin. Known by the courtesy title of "Colonel," he made his name introducing Hereford cattle to the region in 1885 and rose to lead the American Hereford Cattle Breeders' Association. In his later years he turned to oil and gas leasing, scouting for the Texas Company and helping open the county to petroleum exploration.

Carbondale, PA · est. 1999

Built in 1828–29, this gravity railroad was among the first in the Western Hemisphere, engineered to haul anthracite coal to the Delaware & Hudson Canal for shipment to market. Its line ran from Honesdale and was extended over the years toward Archbald and beyond to Valley Junction near Olyphant. Later carrying passengers as well as coal, it operated until the very start of 1899.

Sherman, TX

From 1877 to 1963 the Grayson County Poor Farm sheltered those the era left without support—the aged without caregivers, orphans, widows, and the mentally ill—who worked its fields for their keep and the county's income. On roughly 220 acres bought from the Vaden family, it grew to include a superintendent's house, hospital, and patient quarters. In 1917 reformer Edna Gladney, appalled by conditions, led a drive to clean the facility and relocate its children; after a 1946 fire and postwar decline, the site became Shady Oaks Nursing Home.

Manor Township, PA · est. 1951

This was the great artery of the mid-17th-century fur trade, the chief trail by which the Minqua—also known as the Susquehannock—carried beaver pelts eastward to the European settlements along the Delaware. The trade was so lucrative that the Swedes, Dutch, and English fought one another to control it. The path traced a route of immense commercial and political importance in the early contest for the region.

West Goshen Township, PA · est. 1951

In the 1600s, before English rule was secure, the Great Minquas Path was one of the most valuable trails in the region — the key artery of the fur trade linking Native towns of the interior with trading posts on the lower Schuylkill. Along it flowed the beaver pelts that made the Delaware Valley a prize, and the Dutch, Swedes, and English each struggled to control it. The path crossed near this spot, a quiet reminder of a contest for commerce and empire.

Baltimore, MD

In the depths of the long depression that followed the Panic of 1873, railroad companies slashed already-thin wages one time too many, and in July 1877 the anger boiled over. What began among Baltimore and Ohio Railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and here in Baltimore quickly leapt from city to city along the rail lines, becoming the first genuinely nationwide strike in American history. For roughly six weeks, freight sat idle, factories fell silent, and clashes between strikers, militia, and federal troops left dozens dead before the movement was suppressed.

Raymondville, TX

Since the days of the first Spanish chroniclers passing through the region, a great salt lake here yielded salt that supplied much of northern Mexico. In an age before refrigeration, salt was essential for preserving meat and hides, making such natural deposits a prized resource. The lake tied this corner of South Texas into trade networks reaching deep across the border.

Plainview, TX

George Emmett Green came to Plainview from Missouri in 1909, bringing a gift for machinery and years of experience in pump factories. In 1911 he drilled Hale County's test irrigation well, striking a commercial flow of 1,400 gallons a minute and proving that the fertile but dry South Plains could be farmed at scale. Four years later he invented the hollow-shaft, right-angle gear drive that let automotive engines power irrigation pumps, and built a factory to make affordable pumps that ordinary farmers could buy.

Galveston, TX

Completed in 1882 for the wholesale dry-goods firm of Greenleve, Block & Co., this building was the work of Galveston's celebrated architect Nicholas J. Clayton. Its brick and carved-stone façade, cast-iron columns, and flanking pavilions typify the elaborate commercial architecture of the booming Gilded Age port. Dry-goods firms and later ship chandlers occupied it for nearly a century.

Kaufman, TX

Raised in 1891 from iron, masonry, and wood by builder R. C. Dansby, this sturdy commercial building later became the Greenslade Drug Store after Smith E. Greenslade bought it in 1919. Exposed iron beams carry its roof, and its windows fold open at the top and sides for ventilation—practical touches wrapped in a modified Spanish style. The building remained in the Greenslade family for generations.

Greenville, TX

Founded in 1869, the Greenville Herald grew up alongside Hunt County itself, becoming its oldest continuous business. A succession of owners—from J. C. Bayne to E. W. Harris, who launched a daily in 1890, to the Poole family—carried it through the decades until the Harte-Hanks chain bought and merged it with the Banner in 1956. A local paper of that vintage was the county's running record of births, deaths, harvests, and politics.

Greenville, TX

Chartered by the state in 1886 as a second railroad reached Greenville, this building and loan association reflected local leaders' confidence in the Hunt County seat's future as a trade center. Its founding directors were merchants and businessmen who had settled in Greenville and helped build it up, and their institution became the second-oldest continuing thrift in Texas. It weathered the Great Depression by converting to a federal mutual savings and loan and, renamed Centennial Savings Bank in 1983, carried its founders' community mission forward.

Greenville, TX

In the heart of the Texas Blackland cotton belt, the Greenville Cotton Compress once ranked as the world's largest inland press, squeezing loose bales into dense, shippable form for export. On September 30, 1912, its crews set a record of 2,073 bales in a ten-hour day—three a minute—hand-trucked and loaded by skilled Black laborers who moved 500-pound bales at a run to the rhythm of work chants. The cotton pressed here was prized by the spinning mills of England.

Greenville, TX

When Greenville's electric plant opened on Town Branch in March 1891, it became the first municipally owned electric plant in Texas. Its steam engine ran only at night at first, driving two dynamos that lit 40 street arc lamps and a thousand home lights. Over the following decades daytime service, diesel generators, and expansion carried the town into the modern electrical age.

Greenvine, TX

In 1879 near here, a farmer named William Seidel was digging for water when he struck natural gas at about 106 feet—apparently the first time natural gas was used for fuel in Texas. He simply piped it to a nearby farmhouse. From that accidental beginning grew one of the defining industries of the state, spreading across hundreds of counties in the decades that followed.

Jackson Township, PA · est. 1947

Built about 1837 to supply iron to Freedom Forge near Lewistown, Greenwood Furnace grew into a self-contained iron-making village typical of central Pennsylvania's charcoal iron era. Its restored stack, church, 'Big House,' and company store survive as reminders of the tight-knit communities that formed around these rural industrial works. When the furnace closed in 1904, it was the last of its kind still operating in the region, marking the end of an industrial age.

Longview, TX

Completed in January 1931 after B. A. Skipper Sr. spent years assembling leases and partners, the F. K. Lathrop A-1 came in with an initial potential of 18,000 barrels a day near Longview. Together with the Daisy Bradford and Lou Della Crim wells drilled just weeks earlier, it revealed that these discoveries were all part of one vast pool. Those three wells would be linked and extended into the great East Texas Field, a 200-square-mile giant that set a world record as the largest oil field of its era.

Mission, TX

David Gregg Wood came to the Rio Grande Valley in 1893 and settled in Mission in 1908, where he served as mayor, city commissioner, and bank president while championing the water, sewage, and irrigation projects that made the semi-arid Valley bloom. He built this Bungalow-style home for his family in 1917, adding a second story in the 1920s. Its open gable porch on broad piers has made it a Mission landmark.

Town of Martinsburg, NY

Greystone Manor is the limestone mansion built between 1803 and 1805 for General Walter Martin, the pioneering settler and namesake of Martinsburg on the early frontier of New York's Lewis County. A civic, industrial, religious, and educational leader, Martin raised his Federal-style home in the opening years of American settlement here; Greek Revival wings were added around 1835 under his sons. Over two centuries the house served as a tavern, a convalescent home for Canadian soldiers of the First World War, and a nursing home before the Lewis County Historical Society acquired it.

Morgan's Point, TX

Built in 1896 as a Houston businessman's summer retreat, this house was deliberately turned toward the water to catch the bay breezes of Morgan's Point. In 1950 the flamboyant Roy Hofheinz — future developer of the Astrodome and part owner of the Ringling Bros. circus — bought it, decorated it in a circus theme, and dubbed it "Huckster House." It stayed in his family until 1987, a bayside landmark tied to two eras of Houston enterprise.

Terrell, TX

Built in 1909 to a design by noted Dallas architect James E. Flanders, this house was home to druggist and banker L.E. Griffith Jr. and his wife, Netta, rising on the site of an 1876 dwelling whose basement and outbuildings still remain. Griffith founded the L.E. Griffith Drug Company, presided over First State Bank, and worked through the Chamber of Commerce and local newspaper to champion the town's agricultural growth. The home reflects the influence of a leading merchant in early-20th-century Terrell.

Blessing, TX

Sea captain turned cattleman Richard Grimes opened this family burial ground in 1856 after the death of an infant grandson, on the WBG ranch he and his son had built near Matagorda Bay. The ranch was a school for the cattle trade, employing cowboys like Charles Siringo and Shanghai Pierce, and after the Civil War it launched major trail drives north to the Kansas railheads at Abilene and Dodge City. The family and its ranching legacy stretched into the twentieth century, and the cemetery remains in use today.

Anderson, TX

Densely settled and richly agricultural, Grimes County threw itself behind the Confederacy, voting for secession 907 to 9 and sending nine companies to the army. Its ordnance works at Anderson turned out cannon, cannonballs, firearms, swords, and gunpowder, and a military telegraph line crossed the county on its way from Houston to Marshall. In a darker episode, five men accused of treason were held in the Anderson jail in 1864 under the suspension of habeas corpus before being deported to Mexico.

Hempstead vicinity, TX

Jared E. Groce arrived in Texas in 1822 among the earliest Anglo settlers, his wagon train hauling elaborate plantation equipment into a raw frontier. He and his heirs built a string of cotton plantations with grand names — Bernardo, Groce's Retreat, Liendo — along with an early gin and ferry. On the eve of the Battle of San Jacinto the family fed and ferried Sam Houston's army, a direct contribution to Texas independence.

San Antonio, TX

Frederick Groos, a German engineer, reached Texas in 1848 and won a government freighting contract during the building of Fort Duncan, sending long trains of ox carts across country plagued by raids. With his brothers he built the mercantile firm F. Groos and Co., where frontier banking meant money hidden in cotton bales and cart axles for safety on the road. In 1879 the family erected San Antonio's first purpose-built bank and took a national charter in 1912.

West, TX

August Groppe, Sr., one of the first German settlers in the area, had this structure raised in 1892—the very year the town of West was incorporated. A prosperous cotton farmer and businessman, Groppe hired local brickmasons and used bricks made near West to build the first brick building in the town's business district. Over the following century the building housed a succession of enterprises, from dry goods store to grocery to drugstore.

Corpus Christi, TX

Built around 1929 in the newly opened, elite Oak Park subdivision, this Spanish Colonial Revival house—stucco, hipped tile roof, arched porches—became home to Russian Jewish immigrants Ed and Sadie Grossman in 1931. Ed helped found and led Temple Beth El while running a department store and other ventures; Sadie organized Jewish women's groups. In 1935 it passed to oilman Tom Graham, whose companies ran more than 200 wells across five states.

Groveton, TX

Named for a grove of black jack oaks, Groveton sprang up when the Trinity County Lumber Company built a sawmill in 1882 and a rail branch cut through the surrounding forests. The county seat moved here that same year, and by 1884 a courthouse, stores, hotels, saloons, and a school had appeared. But when the timber ran out and the sawmill closed on the last day of 1930, the once-prosperous town declined, its recovery aided by Civilian Conservation Corps roadwork and reforestation.

Cornwall, PA · est. 1967

Around 1735, Peter Grubb began working iron just north of here, launching an enterprise that would help make Pennsylvania a colonial iron powerhouse. He relied on the Catalan-type forge—a bloomery method with roots in tenth-century Spain—to draw usable iron from ore. Grubb's early efforts seeded the great Cornwall ironworks that followed.

Gruene, TX

German immigrant farmers first settled this Comal County land, originally called Goodwin, before Henry D. Gruene built a sprawling cotton operation here in the 1870s, complete with a mercantile, cotton gin, and dance hall. The thriving community took his name in 1903. When the boll weevil wiped out the cotton crop in 1925, the town slid into decline—only to be revived by preservationists in the 1970s and listed on the National Register in 1975.

Gruene, TX

Built in 1878 by H. D. Gruene on the site of an earlier grist mill, the Gruene Cotton Gin harnessed the Guadalupe River and steam power to process the cotton that was the lifeblood of the surrounding community. The gin drove Gruene's economy for decades until fire destroyed it in 1922, leaving only part of the boiler room. A new electric gin carried on until the boll weevil devastated the cotton crop in 1925.

Gruene, TX

Born to German immigrants in New Braunfels in 1850, Henry D. Gruene built this ornate Victorian home in 1872 in the cotton-farming settlement then called Goodwin. As his fortunes grew, the town was renamed in his honor, and his Eastlake-detailed house became its social and civic anchor. Though the community faded after his death in 1920 and was absorbed by New Braunfels, the mansion still stands as a testament to a Texas-German entrepreneur's ambition.

Gruene, TX

Built in 1878 as a saloon and social hall for the area's cotton farmers, Gruene Hall is believed to be one of the oldest dance halls in Texas. Christian Herry raised the large one-story building under the direction of town developer Henry D. Gruene, who employed many of the farmers who danced there. With its distinctive false front and asymmetrical façade, the hall served as the heart of the community's social life for well over a century.

Corpus Christi, TX

When the great South Texas ranches were carved up in the early 1900s, buyers needed clean titles to land whose ownership often traced back to old Spanish grants. Henry B. Baldwin met that need, founding an abstract firm in 1904 and moving into the young business of title insurance a decade later as Guaranty Title. The two-story brick building raised here in 1926 housed a firm that grew into trusts, mortgage lending, and property management across several counties.

Fredericksburg, TX

Trained as a master millwright in Germany, Carl Hilmar Guenther immigrated to America and made his way from Wisconsin down to the Texas Hill Country, buying land and water rights on Live Oak Creek near Fredericksburg in 1851. His grist mill — rebuilt after a flood swept away its first dam — became a social hub where farmers lingered after their milling, and in 1859 he relocated the operation to San Antonio, where it grew into the celebrated Pioneer Flour Mills.

San Antonio, TX

German-trained millwright Carl H. Guenther founded his San Antonio milling operation in 1859 and, in 1868, built this second dam and mill upstream at a spot closer to town. The upper mill served as an outlet for both of his plants before the family consolidated at the downstream Pioneer Flour Mills around 1900. The vacated building later housed a macaroni factory, an ice cream company, and a garage before being razed in 1926.

Helotes, TX

In the Texas Hill Country west of San Antonio, Swiss immigrants Anton and Marie Gugger were among the pioneers who settled the little crossroads of Helotes. Around 1881 their son Arnold raised this thick-walled limestone building on the bank of Helotes Creek, where it did triple duty as blacksmith shop, general store, and saloon while the family lived upstairs. It even served twice as the town post office, and its 18-inch rough-course walls still anchor the community more than a century later.

Wellfleet, MA · est. 1953

On the Wellfleet bluffs Guglielmo Marconi's company built the first U.S. transatlantic wireless station in 1901–1902, part of the race to send messages across the ocean without cables. In January 1903 the station carried the first U.S. transatlantic wireless telegram, an exchange of greetings between President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII. Marconi's American venture would later become a predecessor of RCA.

Guilford, CT

In 1886, when the Statue of Liberty rose over New York Harbor, the granite that anchored her pedestal came in part from the storied quarries of the Connecticut shoreline near Guilford. The region's dense, salmon-hued Stony Creek granite was prized in the Gilded Age for grand public works, shipped by rail and barge to build banks, bridges, and monuments up and down the East Coast. A century later, on June 28, 1986, the town set this marker to claim its small but enduring share in the nation's most famous symbol of welcome.

Houston, TX

When it opened in 1929, this 37-story Art Deco tower announced Houston's arrival as a modern American city. Financed by the powerful developer and statesman Jesse H. Jones and designed by architect Alfred C. Finn, its stepped tower rose 430 feet and reigned as the city's tallest building for 34 years, housing Gulf Oil and the National Bank of Commerce. A 1986 restoration preserved the landmark, later renamed for JPMorgan Chase.

Panhandle, TX

Guided by geologists' 1904 prediction of oil and the 1918 discovery of nearby natural gas, Amarillo businessmen financed the drilling of Gulf Burnett No. 2 on S. B. Burnett's famous 6666 Ranch. On May 2, 1921, the Gulf Production Company struck the Panhandle's first oil here. Though that initial crude was poor, major strikes at Borger and South Pampa in 1926 ignited a regional boom that made the Panhandle one of Texas's richest oil regions.

Stinnett, TX

After the Spindletop gusher of 1901 set off a statewide oil rush, the boom reached the Texas Panhandle by the 1920s. The Gulf Production Company began drilling on the Dial Ranch, and in the spring of 1922 the Gulf Dial #1—sunk by cable-tool rig beneath an 80-foot wooden derrick—came in as Hutchinson County's first successful oil well, pumping some 500 barrels a day. A camp of oil-field families grew up around it, and the strike helped launch nearby Borger into one of America's boomtowns.

Surfside, TX

The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway threads more than 1,100 miles of barge canals and natural channels from Brownsville, Texas, to Florida — longer and heavier-hauling than the Suez and Panama canals combined. It began humbly in 1854 with a short, hand-and-mule-dug canal linking Galveston Bay to the Brazos, then grew through decades of widening and extension. The most decisive push came in 1905–07, when Texas businessmen Clarence Holland and Roy Miller organized the financing and won the congressional backing that made the modern system possible.

Galveston, TX

In 1874 Galveston County voters narrowly backed half a million dollars in bonds to build a railroad that would leap past rival Houston and stretch clear to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ground broke in 1875, and by 1879 the line reached Richmond across a two-and-a-quarter-mile wooden trestle over Galveston Bay. Under businessman George Sealy the road grew, founding whole towns and later joining the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe system, complete with its famous Harvey House hotels.

Belton, TX

Built in 1912 at the Santa Fe rail yards in Temple, this planing mill turned out replacement wooden parts for the railroad's boxcars and early passenger cars. Its heavy timber frame was engineered to absorb the pounding of the machinery inside, and it stayed in use until the late 1940s. Moved to this site in 1989 to spare it from demolition, it survives as a reminder of the repair work that kept a rail empire rolling.

Upper Merion Township, PA · est. 1982

This roughly 1780 house recalls the small crossroads settlement once known as Bird-in-Hand, named for the sign of a nearby tavern in the old English fashion. For years the building served as the Bird-in-Hand General Store, a gathering point for a community that also supported a forge just to the southwest. As the trades that sustained the village faded, both the store and the forge were quietly converted into homes — a common fate for early industrial hamlets swallowed by suburban growth.

Fredericksburg, TX

Cut off from Northern factories by war, the Confederacy improvised its arms wherever it could—including this Fredericksburg workshop, where gunsmith E. Krauskoff and silversmith Adolph Lungkwitz built machinery to roll copper thin and stamp out percussion caps. They charged the caps with saltpetre from nearby bat caves and quicksilver smuggled through Mexico or past the coastal blockade. Their tiny caps fed rifles and pistols made in a scatter of Texas towns across the interior.

Paducah, KY

Gunsmith Ferd Hummel arrived in Paducah in 1861 and set up a small frame shop that soon served the Federal soldiers occupying the town, who brought their firearms to him for repair. When Confederate raiders looted his shop in March 1864, he had already hidden his best arms at home. He carried on his trade for years, earning a patent for a breech-loading firearm in 1881.

Kerrville, TX

This ranch home reflects the wealth and reach of the Schreiner family, who dominated the Texas Hill Country's ranching and banking. Charles Schreiner bought the land in 1883, and his son Gus F. Schreiner built the first floor of "Cedarcrest" in 1901 while running Schreiner Land and Livestock Co. and serving on the state's Game, Fish, and Oyster Commission. With a second story and remodeling in 1916 and 1919, the working farm's house became a social showplace.

Chambersville, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1845 and brought to Collin County as a boy, Augustus "Gus" Wilson turned crop earnings into shrewd investments in land, stocks, bonds, and railroads, amassing a fortune while living plainly as the farmer he remained. A lifelong bachelor famous for attending world's fairs, he gave his money away—paying off farmers' debts, funding churches of every denomination, building a three-teacher schoolhouse and library, and even handing friends automobiles. By his death at 90 he had given away an estimated $800,000, and in 1935 the Texas Senate hung his portrait in its chamber.

Gustine, TX

Settlers reached this part of Comanche County in the 1870s, some of them working land granted for Republic of Texas military service, and first gathered in a settlement called Evergreen. When a new road opened between Comanche and Hamilton in the 1880s, the whole town simply picked up and moved to sit astride the route, taking the name Gustine after its first postmaster in 1888. The arrival of the Cotton Belt Railway in 1910 brought a boom of gins, businesses, and utilities; when the line closed in the 1930s, State Highway 36 took over its right-of-way and kept the town on the map.

Kerrville, TX

Finished in 1887 for the sum of $2,600, this thick-walled limestone building is among the oldest surviving structures in Kerr County. It was built by Robert Guthrie, a Scottish-born publisher who carried on a family newspaper tradition, housing his Kerrville Eye and a hotel upstairs. Over the following decades it passed through a succession of editors and civic leaders—Ed Smallwood, Jesse Grinstead—and later served as Kerrville's City Hall and a photographic studio, its Italianate stonework surviving into a careful restoration.

Whitley County, IN

In the closing years of the 19th century, before modern medicine reached rural Indiana, hillside "sanitariums" like this one promised cures where doctors were scarce. From 1895 until his death in 1904, Dr. Michael Gutscher and his wife treated patients here with steam therapies and teas brewed from tree bark — a folk-medical practice typical of the era's health resorts. Such places drew the ailing who hoped fresh air and unconventional remedies would succeed where conventional care had not.

Corpus Christi, TX

In 1928 the Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum, later famous for Mount Rushmore, came to Corpus Christi at the Chamber of Commerce's invitation to reimagine its bayfront. Offering his services free of charge, he designed a grand promenade of parks and boulevards anchored by a 32-foot statue of Christ set into the seawall, arms raised as if to shield the city named for the Body of Christ. Voters approved only part of the plan, a bond election failed, and Borglum's attention soon turned to carving four presidents into a South Dakota mountain.

King County, WA

High in Washington's Snoqualmie Pass country, this site marks the mining cabin associated with early prospectors Denny and Guye, whose names still cling to peaks and claims in the area. In the late 19th century the Cascades drew hopeful miners chasing gold and other ores into rugged, timbered slopes, and cabins like this were the rough footholds of that effort. The marker preserves the memory of that frontier mining venture.

Kerrville, TX

In 1905 Florence Butt invested $60 to open the C. C. Butt Grocery Store on Main Street in Kerrville, living with her family above the shop. Her youngest son, Howard E. Butt, delivered groceries as a boy and, after returning from World War I, transformed the business with a cash-and-carry model and expansion into the Rio Grande Valley. From those hill-country beginnings grew H-E-B, today one of the largest privately held companies in the United States and the biggest private employer in Texas.