Conrad Hilton
American hotelier and member of the Hilton family
Conrad Nicholson Hilton (December 25, 1887 – January 3, 1979) was an American hotel magnate and politician who founded the Hilton Hotels chain. From 1912 to 1916, Hilton was a Republican representative in the first New Mexico Legislature, but became disillusioned with the "inside deals" of politics. In 1919, he purchased his first hotel, the Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas, for US$40,000 (equivalent to $742,802 in 2025) and subsequently capitalized on the oil boom. The rooms were rented out in eight-hour shifts. He continued to purchase and sell hotels, and eventually established the world's first international hotel chain. When he died in 1979, he left the bulk of his estate to the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.
Early life
Hilton was born on December 25, 1887, in San Antonio, Socorro County, New Mexico territory, to Norwegian-born Augustus Halvorsen Hilton (1854–1919) and Mary Genevieve Laufersweiler, a devout Catholic of German descent. He attended the Goss Military Academy (since renamed as the New Mexico Military Institute) and St. Michael's College (later called the Santa Fe University of Art and Design), and the New Mexico School of Mines (now New Mexico Tech). From 1912 to 1916, Hilton was a Republican representative in the first New Mexico Legislature, when the state was newly formed.
“Conrad Hilton” enters the record as american hotelier and member of the Hilton family. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Conrad, Hilton and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q324956. VIAF identifies the subject as 77110457. The Library of Congress control number is n85299089. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1887, 1979, 1912 and 1916.
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This entry incorporates text from “Conrad Hilton” 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.