Jim Bradshaw: Jennings' Zigler made fortune on 'worthless' wells

George B. Zigler went to Jennings in 1901 thinking he had only months to live. Instead of dying, he built an enduring legacy as an astute businessman and beloved philanthropist.

When he did pass away 37 years later, the Jeff Davis News described his funeral as “the largest ever seen in Jennings,” and described him as “one of the most beloved characters that this whole section has ever known.”

George was loved partly because he gave away a lot of money. According to one tribute, he was “a friend of the poor and the down and out.” To their good fortune, he had a lot of money to give away.

He was born in Pennsylvania, where his father died when George was 6 years old. He took his first job doing field work on a neighbor’s farm when he was 9. He was 20 when he went to North Dakota, where he met and married Gertrude Boyum and filed a claim for farm land. The marriage worked fine, the land claim not so well. He traded his claim for a herd of cattle, every one of which died within a year from a mysterious disease.

And that was not George’s worst news that year.

“His health never robust, seemed to be declining, and in 1900  …  an examination in a hospital … revealed that he [needed] a major operation if his life was to be prolonged more than a few months, and that with the operation he probably could not survive more than a year,” according to his obituary.

Gertrude’s parents had moved to Jennings about that time and he sent her and their two children to live with them, wound up his affairs in North Dakota, and followed them to Louisiana “thinking he had but a short time to live.”

He got to Jennings just as the first oil wells were being drilled in the Evangeline field and got a job as a gauger. That gave him a close look at wells that produced for a while, but then gave out, and he saw something nobody else noticed

He thought he could revive some of those wells  and shared his idea with W. A. Rowson, who put up $2,000 to test the theory. It worked. Within 90 days the $2,000 loan was repaid and George was making enough to buy up more abandoned wells. Within several months his wells that were once considered worthless were producing 90,000 barrels of oil each week.

The Heywood brothers, the first big operators in the Jennings field, quickly bought the Zigler-Rowson Oil Company for $90,000 — the equivalent of more than $3 million in today’s money. That was the beginning of a storied business career, and, better yet, it came at a time when his health was improving.

As he looked for other investments, he realized that oil from the Evangeline field had to be barged down the Mermentau and through the Gulf to refineries in Texas — and that good money could be made doing it.

He bought three small barge companies and consolidated them to handle the Mermentau trade, enlarged the fleet to haul oil on the Calcasieu after the Vinton oil field was established, and never looked back.

The company eventually operated barges on the Intracoastal Waterway from Texas to Florida, on the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis, the Ohio River to Pittsburgh, the Illinois River to Chicago, the Missouri River to Kansas City, and practically every other navigable waterway in the U.S.

When his health did finally begin to fail in the middle 1930s, he turned over management of the Zigler company to his son Fred, who continued to expand and diversify the company. and to continue his father’s philanthropy.

By the time John Haffey, managing editor of the Jennings Daily News, interviewed Fred in 1958, the company’s  “business interests and investments were much too far-reaching to select merely one or another [to discuss in an interview]. His influence touches shipping and towing, aerial crop dusting, a large apartment building, pipe wrapping and cutting, insurance, the modern G. B. Zigler hotel, farm machinery and equipment, automobile dealerships, and many other enterprises.”

Fred died of a heart attack in November 1960, in the hospital that he’d helped found, but his widow, the former Ruth Burgin of Rayne, continued to head the Fred and Ruth B. Zigler Foundation, known particularly for its scholarship programs, and in 1963 established the Zigler Museum Foundation to operate the Zigler Art Museum

The foundations continue the tradition of philanthropy that began with a man who moved to Jennings under the shadow of death, but who lived and was remembered as a one who was “honest, upright, and the highest type of a gentleman. … A man forever doing good to his fellows.”

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.