Oil Drifts

Originally Journal #6 but now a paid subscriber post about petroleum, families, Kentucky, spies and other things

The discussion about the Meadors unfolded in a bar and restaurant across the street from my Fort Worth hotel, a moderately upscale place called the Red Wasp. The name—as far as I could tell—derived from the colloquial title of Polistes carolina, a species prominent to the region and regarded as being less aggressive than its kin. The Latin identification of the wasp had been granted to it by Henri Louis de Saussure, the Swiss taxonomist and father of the much better-known Ferdinand de Saussure—the father of modern linguistics and structural semiotics.

The man I was with, an attorney from Oklahoma, had represented Ann Helmon, who hailed from the town of Bowling Green, Kentucky. I know the location well; it’s where I have to do the bulk of my grocery shopping. Helmon, a member of the Meadors clan, had been locked into a fevered legal battle that diffused itself into the landscape of local mythology and folklore, and my friend had been called in to assist in whatever way he could. He surprised to learn that I already knew bits and pieces of the Meador’s tale. It’s a sort of regional legend now, I told him.

The goal of Helmon and her family was complicated. The Meadors (often spelled alternatively as ‘Medders’ and ‘Meadows’, a holdover of old naming conventions) strove to unlock a century’s worth of closely-guarded secrets and gain access to an elusive family fortune that had been supposedly stolen by one of America’s richest banking and oil dynasties.

The story behind this supposed fortune, and how it came about, begins far from Kentucky. We fall back backwards not only across time but geography, landing ourselves in the town of Beaumont, Texas. Nestled on the coast where the land gives way to swamps and wetlands criss-crossed by pipeline networks and the occasional refinery, Beaumont sits ninety miles to the east of Houston, not far from the Louisiana border. It’s both the birthplace of the modern American petroleum industry and ground zero for the Meador’s tale.