January 27, 2026
Introduction: In this second of a four-part series, James Pylant tells his own genealogical journey, that started when he was 11, about his vast Meador family and their many connections and stories, including an unclaimed Texas oil fortune. James is an editor at GenealogyMagazine.com and author for JacobusBooks.com, is an award-winning historical true-crime writer, and authorized celebrity biographer.
“Genealogy generally isn’t a dangerous pursuit, but with big money at stake, things can get touchy,” wrote Gail Nardi about the Meador(s)-Meadow(s) clan’s “mad fandango” of claiming kinship with a “drunk, crazy” man [credit: Gail Nardi, “Tale of Untapped Wealth Leads Meadowses to Claim Kinship,” Richmond Times-Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia), 2 March 1986, page A6]. Maybe – just maybe – being able to prove that kinship would bring them wealth. (Note: spelling of the family surname varies, with Meador, Meadors, Meadow, and Meadows all being used.)
The tale starts with Spindletop, the famed oil strike outside of Beaumont, Texas, on 10 January 1901 with a well called Lucas No. 1 erupting into a massive gusher producing about 100,000 barrels of oil a day.
Anthony Lucas, who struck the gusher, had deeded a one-eighth undivided mineral interest to Ephraim Garonzik, who transferred it to James Meadors in 1911.
For whatever reason, James wouldn’t file his all-important deed until 1931. And that was the extent of his involvement; he never sought a division, partition, or accounting. That’s the scenario embraced by his would-be heirs, and lawsuits ensued.
In 1985, U.S. Magistrate Earl S. Hines recommended the dismissal of two of the cases, placing the Meador(s)-Meadow(s) claims on shaky ground.
Like a flock of birds, alleged heirs flitted from one family tree branch to another, unsettled by every gust of wind. Splitting into factions, they disagreed about James’s dates of birth and death, the names of his parents, and exactly how he fit into the vast Meador(s)-Meadow(s) family tree. He became their very own Jackpot Jim to fill their genealogical void with riches, and various connections were drafted as candidates – all traced to the turn of the 20th century in Texas.
James Meadors died in Dallas on 31 October 1925. The true heirs were his four deceased children, a daughter-in-law, and two Dallas churches.
No, said others – it was James Meadors and twin brother William Reuben Meadors who left their family’s Kentucky farm in the late 1800s to find fortune in the Lone Star State. Their grandnephews were among the heirs making a claim, saying the twins died childless.
This article reports:
The clan’s progenitor was a Thomas Meadows who came to what is now Essex County from England… Five generations later, in 1770, Francis Meadows settled in Jollett Hollow, a fold in the west side of the Blue Ridge Mountains that’s now in Page County.
In another version, the twins – called James Allen Meadors and Reuben Jones Meadors – were born in 1891 in Wayne County, Kentucky. James, a surveyor, and Reuben, an oil driller, came to the Texas oilfields and accumulated deeds in exchange for work – including the one-eighth undivided mineral interest in Spindletop.
James’s father and brothers threatened to kill him if he filed the Spindletop deed. “His father had already killed one daughter and son, so he was afraid of him,” explained John Howard Meadows. Not until his father lay dying in an Ohio poor house did James arrange for one of his brothers to file the deed. And then there’s James’s wife, who was supposedly taking orders from someone in Texas who wanted him dead. “She kept him doped up, locked him in the cellar.”
John Howard Meadows said the real Spindletop James Meadors died in a veteran’s hospital in Dayton, Ohio, in 1953. He wasn’t childless; he had two daughters. They made an agreement with John Howard Meadows allowing him 15 percent of the Spindletop fortune because of his five-year devotion and $200,00 worth of work on the case.
Here’s another article about other claimants.
This article reports:
What they [Dan Clark and Jim Profitt] want, of course, is money that they say should have been in their family since their great uncle, James Meadors, bought a tract of Spindletop in 1911 for “$10 and other considerations” from a Dallas lawyer named Ephraim Garonzik. (Local Spindletop experts explain that there was a time after the initial boom years – and before more oil was found – that Spindletop land wasn’t considered valuable.) The two cousins claim that the deed – which they have – entitles the family to a “one-eighth undivided interest” in four tracts of land on Spindletop.
“I don’t know why he bought the land,” Profitt said, explaining that his grandfather and Clark’s grandfather were Meadors’ brothers. “Meadors never had children, so this deed entitles the heirs of his brothers and sisters to whatever he had – a percentage of Spindletop since 1911 – and that’s billions!”
This graphic gives a glimpse into the “myriad” Spindletop fortune claims.
Pelham Humphries’s land grant reportedly went through a series of owners for 75 years before it was purchased in 1911 by James Meadors, supposed twin brother of Ruben Meadors.
But which Ruben?
WikiTree offers Reuben Meadors (1793–1861), who died in Whitley County, Kentucky. Some claim he married Nancy Elizabeth Humphries. “There is no evidence to support the claim, nor any evidence to support Nancy’s existence,” cautioned WikiTree, suspecting it originated with the Spindletop fortune hunters.
In Whitley County, the genealogical pendulum swung back to brother James as source of the would-be inheritance. “The old people always just said he went away and made a lot of money,” recalled Mary Meadows Allen. She had dismissed the legend about James’s Texas estate until 1983 when extended family members started taking the story seriously.
The number of claimants mushroomed, with 20,000 “heirs” by 1989.
Ultimately, the Fifth Circuit held that the 1911 Garonzik–Meador(s) deed conveyed only four specific tracts, all located miles away from Spindletop, and did not include any part of the broader McFaddin inheritance on which the Spindletop field sits.
“My father went to his grave believing that his family would someday have these millions of dollars,” said Judy Cain in a 2007 interview. Her father spent $40,000 trying to claim the Spindletop fortune.
Decades earlier, Ruben Meadors had been the linchpin of the so-called inheritance. In September 1960, J. B. Meadors, a supermarket owner in York, South Carolina, was notified that he would receive $28,000,000 as an heir to the estate of Rubin Medders who died in Texas in 1901. The news sent Meadors “running back and forth from Georgia to Alabama, hunting his relatives.” (“Search on for Heirs to Fortune,” Alabama Journal (Montgomery, Alabama), 28 February 1960, page 3-D.)
A year earlier, another version of the Ruben Meadors scenario emerged, taking a life of its own.
In 1959, a small notice appearing in a Tuscaloosa, Alabama, newspaper sought the heirs of Ruben Medders, this time calling him the brother-in-law of Pelham Humphries. It caught the attention of John Medders, who corralled 200 of his kinfolks for a meeting in Centerville, Alabama, so that they could pursue their inheritance. Amid the crowd was John’s nephew, Ernest Medders. He didn’t take the story seriously. Not at first. Each contributed $30 to the legal fund, though down-and-out Ernest could only donate on an installment plan. Soon, though, he would prevail as the leading pretender to the Meador(s)-Meadows-Medders fortune, and his life would never be the same.
More coming!
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Note on the header image: “Heywood #2 Gusher,” Spindletop, Beaumont, Texas, 1901. Credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
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