Algur H. Meadows
American oilman, art collector and philanthropist
Algur Hurtle Meadows (April 24, 1899 – June 10, 1978) was an American oil tycoon, art collector, and benefactor of Southern Methodist University and other institutions.
Life
Meadows was born on April 20, 1899, in Vidalia, Georgia, the third of seven children of John Morgan and Sally Marie Elora (Dailey) Meadows. After receiving his diploma from Vidalia Collegiate Institute in 1915, he studied at Georgia and Alabama Business College and Mercer University, both in Macon, Georgia. Meadows subsequently left Mercer to travel around the South with a friend, during which journey he held a variety of jobs. He first manifested his business acumen in his accounting work for Standard Oil Company in Shreveport, Louisiana, from 1921 to 1929. During this period he earned a law degree from Centenary College and was admitted to the Louisiana state bar, in 1926. On December 11, 1922, he married Virginia Stuart Garrison, with whom he had one son.
In the fall of 1928 Meadows and friends Henry W. Peters, his son Eric Woods, and Ralph G. Trippett founded a loan company, the General Finance Company, which later became the General American Finance System in 1930. In the summer of 1936 Meadows, Peters and Trippett united with J. W. Gilliland, a petroleum expert, to form the General American Oil Company. The headquarters were then moved from Shreveport to Dallas in 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Algur H. Meadows” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.