Jonathan Westervelt Warner

• September 21st, 2021

To many observers, Jonathan Westervelt Warner – better known as Jack – is seen as an entrepreneur par excellence, a hard-nosed businessman who used a mixture of intuition, information, and guts to transform a single product, family business into a dynamic, diversified organization. Others view him as a traditionalist, a lover of art and history whose interests are as much with the past as with the present or future.

Undeniably, Jack Warner believes in tradition. Directing the activities of a corporation founded in 1884 by his grandfather, Warner follows in a family tradition of leadership. But the past three decades of growth under his leadership have presented a myriad of challenges in a constantly changing business world. Through the years, however, Warner was carefully groomed for his future role and the imprint he would one day make on the lives of so many.

“My mother gave me the ball early in life, and then let me run with it. Even when I tripped and fell,” Warner said in recalling her guidance. “It’s so easy for a parent to make an incompetent out of the son by dominating his position and decisions. My mother always let me make my own mistakes as well as forge my own successes.” That philosophy worked well, for under Warner’s direction Gulf States Paper Corporation began an era of unprecedented growth and development that continues to this day.

Born in Decatur, Illinois, Warner moved to Tuscaloosa at the age of 11 when his family opened Alabama’s first modern paper mill in 1929. Through the years, the Tuscaloosa mill was to grow and make the Gulf States one of the world’s leading producers of the familiar grocery bag and other products made from kraft paper.

Growing up around the Tuscaloosa facility, Warner learned about the paper industry through firsthand observation. He spent summers and holidays as a laborer in the mill while gaining a formal education at Culver Military Academy and Washington and Lee University. After military service in World War II, Warner returned to Tuscaloosa in 1946 to join the family business. In 1950 he became executive vice president, directing the day-to-day operations while, at the same time, making improvements and laying plans for the quantum jumps in growth the future would hold.

April 20, 1957, was to be a fateful Saturday for Warner: the company’s board of directors accepted the retirement of his mother, Mildred Westervelt Warner, as president and named Jack Warner in her place. Thus, he became the third president of Gulf States Paper Corporation.

Sensing the need to move into new markets to meet the challenges of the future, Warner embarked upon a bold program of expansion through the development of new products. The first such move was the Demopolis mill, which opened as a producer of pulp the year after Warner became president. This facility was soon expanded to allow the production of high-quality bleached paperboard for food packaging and achieved many innovative “firsts” in the industry.

Realizing the land resources of the corporation held great potential, Warner expanded its land holdings and extended the Gulf States presence deeper into the forest products industry with the development of timber, mineral, and recreational uses for the nearly 400,000 acres of company land.

In the early 1960s, Warner led the Gulf States in a major expansion into the packaging markets with the opening of a folding carton plant in Maplesville. The Gulf States has expanded this product line with additional plants in North Carolina, Texas, and Kentucky and annually manufacturers enough cartons, food trays, and plates to provide more than 10 for every man, woman, and child in America.

Diversification into additional areas such as school and office supplies, erosion control systems, fiberglass reinforcements, molded-wood products, real estate, resort operations, and fine arts print sales have been the result of Warner’s leadership for the past three decades. Progress has been a product of diversity at Gulf States Paper Corporation as Warner has guided the corporation from its days as a one product-one plant company to today’s varied operations in eight states.

Throughout the development of new businesses, new plants, and new products, one theme has remained constant: Quality Counts. That tradition has been the watchword for the corporation and a constant challenge to excellence for Warner. “My grandfather, Herbert Westervelt, founded this company with the idea that the way to succeed was to provide the best darn product possible,” Warner has said. “My mother and father believed that, too, and this company has been successful because of it. That formula worked because it’s true. You give somebody quality in your product and they’ll come back for it again and again.”

Although Warner could easily be called one of the nation’s leading industrialists, there are many other faces to be revealed. Active in virtually every major community organization, he has labored to bring meaning to the words “quality of life” in the communities with which he has been involved.

Eager to share his knowledge and love of art with others, Warner has frequently lectured on the subject and displays much of The Warner Collection known as one of the most outstanding assemblages of American art to be found anywhere in the Gulf States Paper Corporation National Headquarters, a uniquely Oriental complex visited by thousands annually and inspired by Warner’s war years in Burma with the U.S. Army’s last cavalry troop.

A preservationist and believer in our American heritage, Warner has participated in numerous restoration projects and was instrumental in the founding of Tuscaloosa’s Heritage Week, an annual event that attracts visitors from throughout Alabama and beyond. Among Warner’s more recent preservation projects is the restoration of the Mildred Warner House, an antebellum mansion which he named in honor of his mother.

Art and heritage, Warner believes, are not simply windows to the past but are pathways to the future. “Throughout history, artists have been visionaries,” he has said. “They were the ones who cut through everyday life to see deeper meaning; they were the ones who dreamed about the future. If we study them and learn to think like them, maybe we can find more meaning in the moment and the right road for the future.”

A belief in the sanctity of nature has led Warner to meet the challenge of improving the quality of forests, streams, air, and wildlife in both woodland and industrial settings. These efforts have been recognized through major awards from the National Wildlife Federation, the American Paper Institute, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the State of Alabama.

Warner’s faith in the future of business and the free enterprise system is summed up in his advice to young people to: “Go out to where the action is. Business and industry, that is! ‘Cause, that’s where the excitement is. That is where the solutions will be found. That’s where jobs are created. That’s where the money flows and the prosperity of the nation rises or falls. And that’s where the cream of the youth crop is needed and hopefully will be! And that’s where the real answers to, and the funding for human desires, social needs, and yes, even happiness, lie!”

In the educational arena, Warner has chaired the Board of Visitors of The University of Alabama College of Commerce and Business Administration, initiated the University’s Jack Warner Endowed Scholarship Fund, and served his alma mater, Washington & Lee University, as a trustee. Through the David Warner Foundation, named in memory of his brother who died in a swimming accident, Warner has brought new meaning to the lives of many youngsters through the funding of numerous projects designed to bring a brighter future to the youth of today.

Warner has served as a director or officer of countless civic, business and service organizations. Awards and honors from every segment of society have been heaped upon him including the “Man of the Year” award of the Alabama Council of the National Management Association, an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Alabama, and induction into the Alabama Academy of Honor.

Although his folksy style and homespun, yet incisive, philosophy may deceive more casual acquaintances, Warner is known to maintain a zesty enthusiasm for active sports and a keen appreciation of art, business, and the world around him. Besides daily overseeing the operations of one of the nation’s largest privately held corporations, Warner remains devoted to progress and is a constant promoter of the free enterprise system in America.

Prime F. Osborn, III

• September 21st, 2021

Prime F. Osborn III, had the grand total of 65 cents in his pocket when he arrived at The University of Alabama campus as a freshman in 1932. He wanted an education, he wanted at least one job, if not two, and he wanted to become involved in as many campus activities as possible. Despite the difficulty of achieving any of those goals during the Depression, young Osborn managed to find the time and the energy to accomplish them all. In doing so, he established a reputation as a gifted problem-solver and leader-characteristics that would propel him on a long and distinguished career. When he retired in 1982, he was chairman of the board of the nation’s largest railroad system, a nationally honored civic leader, and one of the country’s most highly regarded and articulate supporters of the American free enterprise system.

Born in Greensboro, Alabama, in 1915 to Prime F. and Anne (Fowlkes) Osborn, Prime Osborn III spent the first twelve years of his life on his family’s cotton farm outside of town. In 1922 he moved with his parents and sister to Greensboro, where he graduated from public school before entering The University of Alabama. His gift for organization and his natural ability as a leader quickly became apparent on campus. While supporting himself with a job in the registrar’s office, with a laundry route, and with other jobs, young Osborn excelled at his studies as well as in extracurricular activities. By the time he graduated from the University’s law school in 1939 he had been tapped into virtually all of the campus’ most prestigious academic, social and civic organizations and had served as president of many of them.

His first full-time job as assistant attorney general for the state of Alabama ended when the U.S. entered World War II and Osborn left to join the war effort. After graduating from the army’s Command and General Staff School in 1942, he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel of artillery and served in the Pacific Theatre (Hawaii, Guam, Saipan, and low Jima), where he was highly decorated for his distinguished service. Osborn returned home after the war to join a law firm, but when he learned of an opening for a lawyer with the Gulf, Mobile, and Ohio Railroad in Mobile, he changed his mind and applied for the position for the railroad instead. That decision, made in 1946, turned out to be one of the most important in his life, for the young lawyer soon found that he had entered what he still calls today “the most fascinating business in the world.”

Railroads and railroad mergers (which became his specialty) were to dominate his career from that point on, and he quickly rose to the industry’s top executive ranks. In 1951, he became general solicitor for Louisville & Nashville Railroad (L&N), and in 1957, vice president and general counsel of Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Company (ACL). As head of ACL’s law department, Osborn was involved in the merger of that company with Seaboard Air Line in 1967, a merger seven years in the making that formed Seaboard Coast Line Railroad Company (SCL).

The formation of SCL was only one of the many mergers Osborn helped engineer, but today it remains one of the highlights of his career. Even larger mergers, however, lay ahead, and with each_ successive one, Osborn’s problem-solving and leadership skills propelled him further up the executive chain of command. By 1970 he was president of SCL and president of Seaboard Coast Line Industries (SCLI), in which capacity he orchestrated the acquisition of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad in 1972. That same year he was made L&N’s s president and chief executive officer. By 1978, Osborn was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of SCLI and its primary railroads, SCL and L&N. The largest and most challenging merger, however, was still to come.

On November 1, 1980, Prime Osborn and Hays T. Watkins, chairman, and chief executive officer of the Chessie System, Inc., completed the merger of Seaboard Coast Line Industries with the Chessie System (Chesapeake & Ohio, Baltimore & Ohio, and Western Maryland railroads) to form the holding company, CSX Corporation. Osborn became chairman of CSX’s s board, Watkins was named president, and the merger they had orchestrated Business Week magazine was characterized as “one of the more remarkable success stories of 1981.”

By 1982, the year Osborn retired as board chairman, CSX Corporation was the world’s largest hauler of coal and the nation’s largest rail system in revenues ($5.4 billion) and assets ($8.1 billion). CSX included the Chessie System Railroads, The Seaboard System Railroad, CSX Beckett Aviation Inc., CSX Minerals Inc., CSX Resources Inc., Florida Publishing Company (the Florida Times-Union, the Jacksonville Journal, and the St. Augustine Record), The New River Company, the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad Company, and The Greenbrier resort hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

Although Prime Osborn rose to a position of eminence as head of a remarkably successful industrial complex, his professional career has been far from the sole interest in his life. Few top business executives in the country, in fact, have contributed more of their time to local and national civic organizations than has he. Over the years he has served on the board or as an officer of nearly thirty organizations, including colleges, universities, hospitals, religious and charitable institutions.

Not surprisingly, many of these organizations have honored him with the highest awards they can bestow. Jacksonville, Florida named him Man of the Year in 1962. The Boy Scouts of America presented him the Silver Beaver Award (1965), the Silver Antelope Award (1967), and the Silver Buffalo Award (1972), and a lake on a scout reservation has been named in Osborn’s honor. In 1973 he received the Religious Heritage of America Award, and in 1976 Olympic champion Jesse Owen presented him the Bicentennial Brotherhood Award for the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Osborn has also received the Americanism Award from the Anti Defamation League of B’Nai Brith and the Salvation Army’s William Booth Award as well as the Order of Distinguished Auxiliary Service-the latter an award presented by the Salvation Army to only 60 individuals in the U.S. in the last 100 years. In 1982 he was honored with the highest awards bestowed by the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce and the American Academy of Achievement, and he was inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor.

Osborn’s professional contributions have been widely noted as well. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from The University of Alabama, Florida Southern College, and Troy State University. The National Defense Transporation Association named him Transportation Man of the Year in 1981, and in 1982 CSX Corporation endowed the Prime F. Osborn Professorship in Transportation at the University of North Florida. He is married to Grace Hambrick of Brookville, Mississippi, also a graduate of The University of Alabama. They have one son, U.S. Navy Commander Prime F. Osborn, IV, and one daughter, Mary Anne Osborn, a candidate for Holy Orders at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge.

Today Prime Osborn is retired, but as more than one reporter has noted, there is nothing “retiring” about him. His involvement in civic and charitable work continues, as does his lifelong interest in railroads. “The retention of transportation as a private enterprise is absolutely imperative,” he says. “Foremost among that is the railroad system. We have a very great responsibility to preserve it.” No single individual had done more to preserve it than Prime F. Osborn III.

John Finley McRae

• September 20th, 2021

John Finley McRae began his remarkable career at the age of eighteen on the lowest rung of the professional ladder of the smallest bank in Mobile. When he retired fifty-four years later, he was chairman of the board of that same bank, and the institution itself Merchants National had become one of the most prestigious financial organizations in the state. The young man and the young bank, it could be said, matured side by side, and together they became two of the most valuable assets of the port city of Mobile.

Born in Montgomery shortly before the turn of the· century, Finley McRae was the son of a Baptist minister, the Reverend George W. McRae, who, in 1907, moved his family to Mobile. There young McRae attended public schools and graduated from Barton Academy in 1913. He then enrolled in Birmingham’s Howard College, but after three semesters, because of his parents’ illness and the depletion of his financial resources, he returned home to find a job.

In February 1915, he accepted a position as runner and stenographer with Merchants Bank of Mobile, then in its thirteenth year of operation. Mr. Ernest F. Ladd, who was made president of the bank that same year, saw much promise in his young employee and encouraged him to learn the banking business. McRae had ideas along those lines himself, and during the next three years, he worked in all departments of the bank and rose to the position of auditor. With the advent of World War I, however, McRae left to join the army. When the war ended, he returned to the bank, and by 1919 he was an assistant cashier.

As the bank grew during the next decade, so did the contributions of Finley McRae. Guided by his friend and mentor Ernest Ladd, McRae began to take a leading hand in the ‘s affairs. Recognizing the importance of the Port of Mobile to the community and to the bank, McRae organized a foreign department. He traveled throughout the southeast and midwest in search of trade business, learned to speak Spanish so that he might communicate better with his South American business associates, and succeeded in establishing a department that was for many years the only fully-organized Foreign Department in a bank between New Orleans and Baltimore.

By 1929, Merchants Bank of Mobile had become Merchants National Bank, with a brand new eighteen-story building, and Finley McRae had become vice president. Under Ernest Ladd’s leadership, Merchants National survived the difficult depression years and emerged larger and stronger than before. Between 1930 and 1940, deposits rose from $12 million to $40 million, and during those same years, McRae’s role in the bank’s affairs expanded at a similar rate. In 1935 he became a director; in 1937, executive vice president; and in 1941, when Ernest Ladd died unexpectedly, Finley McRae succeeded him as president.

Not long after he assumed office, the new president made a compact with the official staff: If they would never refer to him as “boss,” he, in turn, would never fail them in courtesy. That belief in a congenial, cooperative working environment became the hallmark of McRae’s tenure as chief executive, and under his guidance Merchants National became known not only as an important financial institution but as a pleasant place to work and to do business as well.

Believing that money was important only insofar as it contributed to human happiness, McRae, as president, used the bank’s resources to better the lives of as many people as he could. During World War II, when a significant portion of the bank’s staff left to join the war effort, Merchants National supplemented their military pay so that they could maintain their incomes at pre-induction levels. Recognizing the important role the oil industry could play in improving the region’s economy, McRae and his staff began financing oil production in Louisiana and Mississippi in the late 1940s. As a consequence, Merchants National’s Petroleum Department was well established and ready to serve Mobile when oil was discovered at nearby Citronelle in 1955.

During the almost quarter of a century of Finley McRae’s presidency, Merchants National continued to expand. It was improved services, however, and not expansion in and of itself that McRae sought, for the true worth of a bank, he often said, was measured by its usefulness rather than by its size. To improve its usefulness to the community, then, Merchants National entered the branch banking field in 1955, when a law permitting branch banking in Mobile County was passed, and that same year the bank also began enlarging and renovating its downtown quarters. Perhaps the most significant step toward improving services came in 1959, however, when Merchants National became the first bank in Alabama, and among the first in the South, to install electronic data processing equipment. The move enabled the bank to introduce “no passbook savings” to Mobile and to improve many of its other customer services.

Finley McRae’s reputation as a respected banker with a broad knowledge of financial affairs prompted many business and industrial corporations to call upon his services as a director. In that capacity, he served some of the largest corporations in Alabama, including Waterman Steamship Corporation, American Liberty Insurance Company of Birmingham, Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad Company, Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company, Southern Industries Corporation, International Paper Company, Alabama Power Company, and United Gas Corporation. McRae also served in important advisory and directional capacities in the Federal Reserve System and represented the southeastern states on the Federal Advisory Council.

Known throughout his life for his “genius at getting things done” and for his energetic support of the community, McRae became a central figure in the civic life of Mobile. He helped found and served for many years as a trustee of the United Fund of Mobile; he was a founding director of the Southern Research Institute, a non-profit corporation devoted to scientific research; he served on the board of trustees of the Mobile Infirmary for several decades during which the institution became one of the largest and best-equipped hospitals in the South; and from 1955 to 1957, he served as chairman of the Rhodes Scholarship Selection Committee for the State of Alabama.

An avid sports fan, McRae was a founding director of the Mobile Touch down Club, which developed a county-wide athletic program for Mobile’s youth. He was also chairman of the board of trustees of the Ernest F. Ladd Memorial Stadium Corporation, president of the Mobile Arts and Sports Association, and president of the Senior Bowl Association. (Without McRae, noted the Mobile Press-Register, “there would be no Ladd Stadium and no Senior Bowl.”)

McRae’s many contributions to the region were publicly acknowledged in 1955, when the Chamber of Commerce named him Mobilian of the Year, and again in 1963 when Spring Hill College awarded him an honorary doctorate. Finley McRae, said the college’s trustees, is a “most exemplary” citizen, a man whose “free-reined energy, breadth of vision, integrity of character, and dedication to Christian ethical ideals … led him to a position of respect and responsibility unique in this region . . . His service on behalf of his fellow citizens has been generous. His faith in the future of this region is firm.” And, the trustees concluded, as did the people of Mobile, that every citizen in the port city “is better off because of his presence in our midst.”

Carl Tannahill Jones

• September 20th, 2021

Carl Tannahill Jones was a man of vision. Everywhere he looked, he saw the potential for progress. He saw it in his state. He saw it in his region. And most of all he saw it in his own hometown. As mentor, guide, organizer, benefactor, and chief cheerleader, Carl T. Jones spent his life helping transform a sleepy cotton mill town in North Alabama into an internationally-known space center and thriving industrial community. “Mister Huntsville,” many called him, and no one deserved the title more.

Dedication to one’s community and confidence in its future was not uncommon characteristics in the family from which he came. Great-grandson of one of Madison County’s earliest white settlers (Isaac Criner), Carl was the last of six children, and the youngest of five sons, born to Elvalena (Moore) and George Walter Jones. The elder Jones, a farmer, a civil engineer, a state senator, and a leader in Huntsville’s city government, also found time, in 1886, to establish an engineering firm that still prospers today. From its inception, G. W. Jones and Sons, as the enterprise was called, concerned itself with the welfare of the community. When the city coffers were bare (as they frequently were), when Huntsville could not afford to buy so much as a bale of hay on credit for its mules, when work performed for the city was not compensated at all, G. W. Jones and Sons stepped in and lent a hand. And the policy set by the father of serving the city on almost an “at cost” basis was continued by the sons, all of whom at one time or another joined the firm.

Carl T. Jones joined the firm in 1929, the same year he graduated in engineering from The University of Alabama, and from 1929 until 1960 he served as Huntsville’s city engineer. During those years, Huntsville experienced dramatic changes: it survived a great depression, played its part in winning a world war, became a key component in the U.S. space program, and transformed itself into one of the most energetic industrial communities in Alabama. Carl Jones had a hand in it all.

A colonel in the Alabama National Guard Combat Engineers when World War II broke out, Jones served in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, and as deputy chief of staff of the XIX Corps in Europe, he participated with distinction in the Normandy landings and in combat operations on the European front.

Returning to Huntsville after the war, Jones found that the city and the times had changed. There was a sense of optimism in the air and a thirst for progress. Before his feet were firmly replanted in Huntsville soil, a group of businessmen from South Huntsville sought his help in expanding the city limits. Despite the fact that the city then consisted of less than four miles and was actually smaller than it had been before the Civil War, there was opposition to expansion and change. Carl Jones did what he was to do repeatedly throughout his lifetime; he talked to people, explained what the future could hold, and then quietly set an example for others to follow by donating his own engineering services to the project. As a result, the first major expansion in Huntsville’s city limits occurred in 1947, and a pattern of orderly growth was established.

During the next twenty years, as Huntsville’s land area grew to more than 100 square miles, Carl Jones’ personal and professional contributions to the community grew as well. When pumping stations, utility systems, reservoirs, and other municipal projects were needed, G. W. Jones and Sons provided the engineering services. When the U.S. space program arrived, bringing with it thousands of people who needed homes and city services, the firm was at the forefront of the expansion. And when local authorities needed data to plan some of their more ambitious public projects, G. W. Jones and Sons, with Carl Jones as senior partner, used the firm’s resources to provide it.

Jones’ confidence in the free enterprise system, his unwavering belief in Huntsville’s potential, and his infectious enthusiasm for an expansive idea made him an ideal leader. In 1957, when a textile manufacturing plant in Huntsville closed, Jones saw possibilities for the future. He organized (and later served as president for five years) Huntsville Industrial Associates, Inc., a group of business and professional leaders, who purchased the property in hopes of attracting other industries to the area. Although regarded by many as a bad investment at the time, the old mill complex was soon transformed into the Huntsville Industrial Center. At its peak, the facility housed some 6000 aerospace employees and had a payroll in excess of $30 million.

Jones also founded the Huntsville Industrial Expansion Committee, in which he served as a board member for many years and for three terms as president. Recognizing that federal spending on space programs would one day decline and that the economic health of the region depended upon diversified economic development, Jones intensified his efforts to bring new industries to the area. Largely as a result of his leadership, Huntsville succeeded in diversifying its economic base, and as a consequence, the region did not suffer when the inevitable federal cutback in space funding finally occurred.

Because he served almost every civic organization in Huntsville as either a member or a director or as president, and because he had a hand in every major decision affecting the city for a period of twenty years, most people thought of Carl Jones as a full-time public servant. In many ways he was, but he still found time to head the family’s now diversified firm (engineering/insurance/ real estate), to manage a 10,000-acre cattle farm, and to serve on the boards of Huntsville’s First National Bank (predecessor of First Alabama Bank) and the North Alabama Mineral Development Company. And he never stopped looking to the future.

Recognizing early on the value of a university to the region, Jones worked tirelessly to further the development of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, believing that one day that institution would become the area’s foremost economic unit.

Although Carl Jones never sought the limelight and many of his civic contributions were never publicized, the citizens of Huntsville knew what his vision and his years of service had meant to their community, and they publically honored him on several occasions. In 1965 the region’s chamber of commerce presented him its “Distinguished Citizen Award,” and in 1967 the multi-million dollar Huntsville-Madison County Jetport – a symbol for many of the region’s progressive spirit and its confidence in the future – was named Carl T. Jones Field. It was an especially fitting tribute to a man who had himself become a symbol of that same public spirit and confidence.

Carl Jones did not live to see the jetport completed, nor to see it named in his honor. His untimely death at the age of 58 shocked and saddened an entire community that had come to regard his vision and his leadership as indispensable. Editorials were written about his contributions, and tributes poured in from around the state. He was, said the eulogists, a man who had led the way when the path was not clear, a man who had done more for his community in his fifty-eight years than most people could accomplish in several lifetimes. He was, they all agreed, the father of the region’s industrial expansion, and no one would ever deserve the title “Mister Huntsville” more.

Fox Henderson, Sr.

• September 20th, 2021

Fox Henderson; noted the Troy Messenger in 1918, “was a born leader of men,” a man who possessed “attributes that would have made him a success in any field of endeavor he might have undertaken.” His principal characteristics, the paper noted, were energy, willpower and determination,” and “the intuitive judgment to use his talents to the best advantage.” Those characteristics were to benefit not only Henderson and his family, but the city of Troy, and indeed all of the people of Southeast Alabama, for during the decades before and after the turn of the century, Fox Henderson built a varied and extremely successful network of businesses and industries that strengthened the economy of his region and brought new hope to many of its inhabitants.

Born in Pike County, Alabama, in 1853, the oldest son of Jeremiah Augustus Henderson and Mildred Elizabeth (Hill) Henderson Fox Henderson moved with his family to the county seat of Troy in 1869 when his father opened a mercantile business there. Young Henderson and his brother Clem joined their father in the prospering business, and in 1881, the brothers expanded their financial, holdings by purchasing the Pike County Bank, a still struggling operation that had been in business only four years. With Fox Henderson as president, the brothers changed the institution’s name to Farmers Merchants Bank and moved the facility to new quarters. Alabama, and as its reputation for reliability spread throughout Pike County, the institution’s assets grew. “The personality of Fox Henderson,” one local reporter noted, “and the confidence and trust which the citizens of this section held for his ability and dependability were enough in itself to bring the institution increasing renown.” The Henderson brothers operated Farmers & For twenty years after its founding, Farmers & Merchants was the only financial institution in that section of Merchant’s as a private bank until 1898, when they received a state charter. Such was the growth and development of the firm’s business, however, that the board of directors decided in 1902 to expand their operations, and Farmers & Merchants became Farmers & Merchants National Bank that same year.

Banking, however, was far from Fox Henderson’s sole interest. In 1880, a year before he and his brother purchased the bank, Henderson became a partner in Michener, Henderson & Company, makers of spokes, handles, and picker sticks. Some twenty years later, the firm’s 125 employees were producing 15,000 spokes, 500,000 handles and 640,000 picker sticks a year. And they made other products too, such as a gigantic special-order cart constructed in 1902 for a mill in Goshen. “The wheels of the cart,” reported the Troy Messenger, “are ten feet high and thirty feet in circumference. The tires are nearly one-half-inch thick and almost six inches wide.”

Willing to think in expansive terms and always open to new business ventures that might bring needed capital to the area, Henderson spotted another opportunity in 1887, when Alabama Midland Railway Company was organized to build a railroad from Montgomery, to Troy, to Chattahoochee, Florida. On the same day that Alabama Midland was incorporated, Fox Henderson and others – many of whom were officers in the railway company – filed a declaration of incorporation for Alabama Terminal and Improvement Company. The purpose of the new business: to build and equip the proposed railroad. Fox Henderson served as treasurer of the company.

Three years later, in 1890, yet another venture captured his imagination. That year he opened Henderson Knitting Mills, an operation with an output of fifty dozen garments a day. Fox Henderson served as secretary-treasurer. By the turn of the century, he had become one of the largest landowners in a several-county area, and on part of his 6000-acre holdings, Henderson established the Arcadia Dairy, whose imported Jersey cows supplied the citizens of Troy with fresh milk and butter daily. Henderson then turned his attention to the shortage of fertilizer in the area. Although Troy already had a large fertilizer mill, the demand for its products was such that the county still had to import several thousand tons a year. Convinced that the market could support another mill and that its successful operation could establish Troy as an exporter of fertilizer, Henderson forged ahead as he had on many occasions before. The Standard Chemical and Oil Company that he founded became the largest plant of its kind in Alabama. By 1918, the 300 employees in the feed mill and chemical plant were handling 8000 tons of peanuts and producing 38,000 tons of crushed phosphate rock and 75,000 tons of fertilizer annually.

Henderson’s business and industrial interests had become so complex by 1911 that he formed a holding company and took his children in as partners, consolidating his own holdings and theirs for central operation. By providing financing for institutions throughout South Alabama and by backing many of the leading corporations in the area, Fox Henderson & Sons became widely known in Alabama for its progressive policies and its reliability as a financial institution. The scope of Henderson’s own business affairs was revealed in a 1911 pamphlet published by the firm. In that year, Henderson held the following offices: He was president of the First National Bank of Dozier’s, the First National Bank of Luverne, Farmers & Merchants National Bank of Troy, Henderson National Bank of Huntsville, the First National Bank of Brantley, and Standard Chemical and Oil Company of Troy. He was vice president of the First National Bank of Andalusia, the First National Bank of Brundidge, the Henderson Lumber Company of Sanford, and the Planters Trading Company (general merchants) of Elba. He was a partner in Henderson & Hill (department store and advancing merchants) of Brantley, the Cody-Henderson Company (general merchants, livestock, fertilizers) of Luverne, the Henderson-Black Company (importers, jobbers, and distributors) of Troy, and Henderson Live Stock Company (mules, horses, wagons, buggies, harness) of Troy.

The reputation for sound business dealings begun by Fox Henderson, Sr. was to be continued by the sons. “Fox Henderson & Sons,” noted the Troy Messenger in the early 1930s, “through its farsighted and constructive activities, has built the largest and strongest financial institution in Southeast Alabama and one that is reputed to be among the most stable in the entire South.” In civic affairs, also, Fox Henderson took a leading hand. When his congregation needed laborers to build a new church or when his Masonic Lodge needed a lot on which to construct a hospital, Henderson supplied them, and he donated his time and his resources to many other public endeavors as well.

Henderson’s death in 1918, following a long illness, was mourned throughout South Alabama by his family, friends, business associate, and many others who understood what his leadership had meant to the region. He was remembered b them as a quiet, determined man who never sought the limelight and who never spoke unkindly of his fellow man. He was remembered as an inventive and courageous pioneer in the world of business and industry, whose confidence in the region’s future had inspired confidence in others. As more than one obituary noted, much of the progress and prosperity South Alabama had witnessed in the preceding decades had been due in no small measure to the vision and leadership of Fox Henderson. “He was a born leader of men,” it was said, and “he was a life out of the ordinary.”