William Marsh Rice: A centennial portrait

William Marsh Rice: A centennial portrait

BY
CHRISTOPHER DOW
Special to the Rice News

Quick now: Who
was William Marsh Rice?

It’s a
sure bet that if you’ve spent much time at Rice University,
you know he’s the founder. And most of you know how
unscrupulous lawyer Albert Patrick and faithless valet Charles
Jones conspired to murder Rice and steal his fortune, and
how Capt. James A. Baker uncovered the plot and saw justice
done.

Rice’s death
100 years ago on Sept. 23 and the subsequent trial have
become iconographic for the Rice community. Oh, and of course
you know that Rice’s ashes are encased in the base
of the bronze statue affectionately called “Willy,” located in the Academic Quadrangle. But who was this man
whose life spanned most of a century that saw the rise of
American industrialism, the Civil War and the taming of
the West and who, as a product, founded one of the finest
institutions of higher learning in the world?

William Marsh
Rice was born to Patty (Hall) and David Rice in Springfield,
Mass., March 14, 1816. Named for pioneering Methodist circuit
preacher William Marsh, he was their third child, and seven
more would follow, although three did not survive infancy.
While history leaves little record of Patty Rice, David
was a relatively prominent citizen of his community. At
the time of William’s birth, David worked in the forging
shop of the Springfield Armory. He later performed other
tasks there, such as boring gun barrels and making bayonets,
until 1833, when he was appointed to the position of inspector.

But David was
not content with just one occupation, and through the years
he also served in local and state political positions and
helped found the Methodist Episcopal Society’s first
house of worship in the area. In the mid-1820s, David and
six other Springfield citizens formed a committee to oversee
the construction of Springfield’s first high school—an
effort that surely influenced William to later found the
Rice Institute. The Classical High School opened in September
1828, when William was 12, and he enrolled two years later.

Not much is
known about William’s early years. In spring 1899,
in a letter to his sister, Charlotte, he wrote, “Our
childhood had many pleasant hours … and the troubles
were soon forgotten. Father’s and Mother’s thoughts
were mostly devoted to their children. I do not think they
worried very much. Father had so firm a reliance upon providence
that nothing seemed to lay heavy on his mind—though
he was sensitive, which could be seen at times.” Spelling
and punctuation were never William’s strong suits,
and that may be because his high-school career was short-lived.
Whether because of restlessness or for financial reasons,
he dropped out at age 15 and went to work as a clerk in
the Family Grocery Store, owned by a retired whaling captain
named Henry L. Bunker.

The Merchant
William worked for Bunker for four or five years and then
decided he knew enough about the business to open his own
store. Because William had not yet attained his majority,
his father had to co-sign his note, but William made good
on his father’s trust and within two years had accumulated
$2,700 in profit.

By now it was
1837, and the nation entered into a period of financial
panic that affected businesses everywhere, including William’s.
But the newspapers carried a note of hope for adventurous
souls—there was fresh and unmistakable opportunity
in the new nation of Texas.

Recognizing
the potential for unlimited growth in the new nation, William
sold his store and invested the profits in merchandise and
trade goods, which he sent off to Galveston by sea. Meanwhile,
he made the journey there by rail and by packet down the
Ohio and Mississippi rivers. When he arrived in Galveston
in October 1838, William was a wiry man, rather small in
stature, with thick, dark hair and piercing blue eyes filled
with energy. Those eyes saw an ugly frontier seaport whose
muddy, shanty-lined streets were full of stumps. But that
sight couldn’t have been more disheartening than the
news that the ship carrying his merchandise had been lost
at sea. He was penniless.

He didn’t
stay that way for long. In February 1839, he was issued
a conditional grant to 320 acres of land by the Harrisburg
County Board of Commissioners, at the time a not-uncommon
procedure to disburse land to settlers in the area. Two
months later, he embarked on the first of his many Texas
business ventures when he agreed to furnish liquor for the
bar of the Milam House—an ironic occupation since,
throughout his life, William never smoked or drank anything
even as stimulating as coffee or tea.

With the proceeds
from his business, he began acquiring property, and he entered
into his first business partnership in 1840, leasing property
with Barnabas Haskill, a Houston merchant. The partnership
dissolved two years later, just in time for William to join
the Texas militia under Gen. Sidney Sherman, formed to repel
Santa Anna’s attempt to recapture San Antonio. The
Mexican army retreated before Sherman’s force arrived,
and the militia was dissolved. And William returned to business
in Houston.

A Fortune
Grows
In 1844, he entered into a partnership with Ebenezer B.
Nichols, a successful local businessman whose ambitions
matched his own. They brought in goods and merchandise from
New Orleans and the Eastern seaboard for resale to local
settlers and plantation owners. As he prospered from his
import business, William began considering exports as well,
and at the time in Texas, that meant cotton.

Although only
eight bales of cotton had been sent to the coast from Houston
in 1839, the year William first engaged in business, by
1844, he and other Houston merchants were determined to
up the ante. They offered a prize of a gold cup to the first
cotton planter to bring in 20 bales. That spring, the first
cotton compress was brought to the city, and by the following
year, nearly 50,000 bales were shipped out of the city.

The cotton business
proved very lucrative for William, though he didn’t
involve himself in the growing of cotton—bad weather
and bugs made that too chancy a proposition. But he did
recognize that the cotton economy was dependent on good
transportation. Until then, every bale that came into the
city had to be dragged there by ox team, and fall rains
frequently conspired with the region’s thick gumbo
clay to impossibly mire the country roads at the height
of market time. William knew there had to be a better way,
and in 1850, he became involved in the Houston and Brazos
Plank Road Co., which began “paving” the muddy
byways with wooden planks. That idea lasted only until William
invested in the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado Railroad,
which was among the first railroads incorporated in Texas
and the first to actually lay track—in 1852, from Harrisburg
to Stafford. The railroad spelled the end of plank roads.

About this time,
William began to send for other members of his family. His
older brother, David, was the first to join him, followed
by Caleb and Frederick, although Caleb soon returned to
New England. Also about this time, on June 29, 1850, William
wed Margaret Bremond, daughter of a business associate.
On their honeymoon, the newlyweds accidentally missed passage
aboard the Mississippi steamer Oregon, which exploded and
sank in the river a few days later.

Landowner
and Benefactor
When the Rices returned to Houston, they purchased a house
built by William’s business partner Nichols three years
earlier, located at the corner of San Jacinto and Congress
streets. They attended Houston’s nascent cultural events
and joined the Episcopalian Christ Church, to which William
became a frequent benefactor. It was here that he met the
Rev. Charles Gillette, a proponent of public education.
Influenced by Gillette, and undoubtedly by his own father’s
efforts toward public education, William began actively
supporting various educational endeavors in Houston. In
1856, he was an incorporator of the Houston Academy; in
1857, he was a member of the board of the Houston Educational
Society; and two years later, he was a trustee of both the
Second Ward Free School and the Texas Medical College.

Also in the
early 1850s, William began buying prime forest land in western
Louisiana, eventually acquiring more than 50,000 acres.
This land was to prove immensely important to the fledgling
Rice Institute, providing the funds to construct the earliest
buildings on campus and to hire the first faculty. And in
the 1930s, a hidden wealth in oil and gas was discovered
there, bolstering the Rice Institute’s financial circumstances
during the Great Depression.

The 10 years
before the Civil War were prosperous ones for planters and
cotton merchants, William included. He reported an increase
in net worth to $750,000 from $25,000 during that period,
which may have made him the second richest man in Texas,
second only to sugar planter John Hunter Herndon of Brazoria
County. Along with his other ventures, William furthered
his involvement with transportation by founding the Houston
and Galveston Navigation Co. and playing an instrumental
role in early development of the Buffalo Bayou ship channel.
He also invested in the Huntsville Railroad Co., the Houston
Tap & Brazoria Railway Co., the Houston & Texas
Central Railroad Co., and the Houston Direct Navigation
Co. His nontransportation investments included the Union
Marine and Fire Insurance Co., the Houston Insurance Co.
and the City Bank of Houston.

But William
could not coast on his past successes. The advent of the
Civil War brought an almost immediate halt to the building
of railroads and the flow of merchandise though coastal
cities, and Houston’s booming business life came to
a standstill. The war hit the Texas economy particularly
hard because Texas had to import nearly everything from
clothing to food to equipment and luxuries. The only remaining
industry on which Houston could rely was cotton. William
began dispatching delivery wagons to the Richmond area southwest
of Houston and, despite the war, did a booming trade with
plantations.

As William began
to focus more keenly on making money through cotton, his
wife worked in the war-relief effort. The Rice name appeared
regularly on the lists of those who contributed to patriotic
causes during the war, and in 1962, Wm. M. Rice and Co.
donated funds toward the purchase of a home for the widow
and children of a decorated soldier who perished on the
battlefield. William also made donations for the relief
of volunteers’ families.

Tragedy and
Change
Then tragedy struck in 1863 as Margaret fell ill and, at
the age of 31, died of unknown causes. Struggling with the
loss of his wife, William left Houston for the remainder
of the war, moving to Monterrey, Mexico, in January 1864.
By February, he had made his home in Matamoros, Mexico,
a cotton and shipping center where the Rio Grande flows
into the Gulf of Mexico. He remained there until July 1865.
Not much is known about how William spent his time during
this period of political confusion except that he became
caught up in the chaotic yet profitable market where gold
was the medium of exchange and cotton could bring a dollar
a pound. He also traveled to Havana and did not return to
Houston until August 1865.

When he did
come back, he was out of the cotton business, but that didn’t
slow him down much. In 1866, he again took up the reins
of business leadership in Houston as director of the Houston
Insurance Co. By October of that same year, the Houston
Direct Navigation Co., with William on the board of directors,
had extended its charter to improve navigation on Buffalo
Bayou. And in 1868, William, together with two other directors
of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad, set up a partnership
for laying out town sites along the route of the expanding
Texas railroad. William later claimed that the war had destroyed
his businesses, but according to financial documents, he
actually came out of the war even wealthier than before.

In 1867, William
married his second wife, Julia Elizabeth Baldwin Brown,
affectionately known as Libbie, in Christ Church in Houston.
Libbie, the sister of Frederick Rice’s wife, Charlotte
Baldwin Rice, was the 40-year-old widow of wealthy landowner
John Brown. With the onset of the worst yellow fever epidemic
in Houston’s history, the couple decided to move to
New York City, journeying to Houston only for business.

Leaving a
Legacy
William began spending more and more time away from Houston,
and he renewed his family ties in Massachusetts. He showed
great generosity toward members of his family and bestowed
many gifts on his relatives, including a new home for his
aging parents and financial help for his married sisters
and their children. Before long, he was speaking of buying
a house in New Jersey, and he eventually purchased a home
in Somerset County, just 30 miles outside of Manhattan.

Now nearing
60 and childless, William began to consider a major ongoing
project or institution that he could endow with his still-growing
fortune. During his frequent visits to Houston, he had spoken
with Cesar Maurice Lombardi, president of Houston Electric
Light and Power Co. and president of the Houston School
Board, about the matter. Lombardi encouraged William to
build a municipal high school, but after some thought, William
decided to fund an institute of higher learning in Houston.
The charter for the William M. Rice Institute for the Advancement
of Literature, Science and Art was signed on May 13, 1891,
and registered in Austin six days later.

William initially
established an endowment of $200,000 for the Rice Institute
but revised his will in 1896 after the death of his second
wife and left the bulk of his estate, totaling $4,631,259.08,
to the institute, intending to give the new institution
a firm financial foundation. “Texas received me when
I was penniless, without friends or even acquaintances,”
he wrote. “And now in the evening of my life, I recognize
my obligation to her and her children. I wish now to leave
to the boys and girls struggling for a place in the sun
the fortune I have been able to accumulate.”

Pictures of
William in his later years show a slight man with a white
beard, a direct gaze and a stern expression gained through
many years of shrewd entrepreneurship. During his life,
William contributed significantly to the development of
Houston and Texas through his many roles as merchant, liquor
supplier, shipowner, cotton trader, railroad builder, landowner,
timber merchant, vegetable oil processor, rancher, hotel
owner and moneylender. Today, though, at the 100th anniversary
of his death, most of that seems like ancient history. But
if we remember little about William Marsh Rice beyond the
events surrounding his death and his statue in the Academic
Quadrangle, we do remember him for his greatest achievement—the
exceptional university he made possible.

— Christopher
Dow is editor of Sallyport, the alumni magazine of Rice
University.