Algur Hurtle Meadows

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.

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 a friend, Ralph G. Trippett, founded a loan company, the General Finance Company, which became the General American Finance System in 1930. In the summer of 1936 Meadows and Trippett united with J. W. Gilliland, a petroleum expert, to form the General American Oil Company, the headquarters of which were moved from Shreveport to Dallas in 1937. The new company experienced a phenomenal expansion in operations, due to an ingenious method of acquiring oil-producing properties that Meadows developed. The scheme, which Meadows dubbed the "ABC plan," involved three parties in the purchase transaction to minimize tax liability and the use of interest-bearing oil payments to meet a large percentage of the purchase price. Meadows became the president and major stockholder of the General American Oil Company in 1941 and was elected chairman of the board in 1950. By 1959 his company had acquired 2,990 oil wells in fifteen states and Canada and was drilling for oil in Spain.

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