Why the Wisners aren’t rich and famous

The other day a distant relative wrote me, after seeing my post about my ancestor Edward Wisner. He was researching family history, and sent me a link to a story about the Louisiana Land and Exploration Company.

LL&E traces its roots to the 19th century, when midwestern businessman Edward Wisner moved to Louisiana for his health. Wisner was struck by swampy southern Louisiana’s resemblance to the low-lying Netherlands, where industrious farmers had reclaimed millions of acres for farming. Envisioning farming on a grand scale, Wisner bought hundreds of thousands of acres, built levees, and drained the land.

Wisner’s plans, however, were thwarted by southern Louisiana’s severe weather. A 1915 hurricane destroyed many of the levees that Wisner had constructed. The venture’s finances faltered and in time there were foreclosures. Much of the land was eventually taken over by a group of midwesterners led by Henry Timken, who owned an Ohio ball bearing company. Timken hoped to lease the land to fur trappers.

In 1925 speculator Edward Simms approached Timken with an idea for a company that would explore for oil in the almost 600,000 coastal acres Timken then controlled. Timken agreed and in 1926 exchanged his acres for shares in the Border Research Corporation.

It soon became apparent that the land owned by Louisiana Land and Exploration, as the company was renamed in 1927, was rich in petroleum resources. In 1928 LL&E signed a contract with Texas Co. (now Texaco) in which that company agreed to lease all of LL&E’s acreage around ten productive salt domes.... In the contract, which was very generous for its time, Texaco agreed to pay LL&E a 25-percent royalty on production and 8 1/3 percent of its net profits on a dome-by-dome basis. The contract would remain in effect for as long as Texaco continued to drill on the acreage.

And so it is that the descendants of Edward Wisner do not have large trust funds full of Texaco money. However, for $18 we can still buy an original LLE stock certificate (pictured above).

LLE’s other claim to fame is that in 1987 fourteen leucistic alligators were born on the company’s alligator farm. These white gators were not albinos—their eyes were blue, not pink—but they were apparently quite charming.

The white gators were caught almost as they hatched. They were cute little critters, easily held and cooed over by television reporters.

“They totally infatuated us, and we found out they did the same to other people,” says Leighton Steward, LL&E’s former president.