Arthur Edward Stilwell, founder of Port Arthur, was born in Rochester, New York. Stilwell was the son of Charles H. and Mary A. (Pierson) Stilwell, of English extraction. His grandfather was Hamblin Stilwell, a noted financier and promoter, one of the builders of the Erie Canal and a major factor in the organization and construction of the Western Union Telegraph System and New York Central Railroad. Arthur Stilwell left home at fourteen and persuaded one of his family's former Rochester neighbors, George Darling, to employ him as Billiard Room Cashier of his Southern Hotel, in St. Louis, at the salary of $60 per month. Stilwell then moved to Bradstreet's Commercial Agency as head of their Mailing Department and from there to New York City to be a floorwalker in a novelty store. Three months later, his mother asked him to return home. His father had speculated and lost heavily in Pennsylvania oil ventures, and the family had been forced to sell their house and move to an apartment. Stilwell returned home, with his father's permission took $400 left him by his grandfather, and bought a printing plant in Smith's Arcade. He sold by day and learned the printing trade by night, and his new venture soon became successful. Six months later Stilwell joined Williamson and Highy, stationers and law-blank printers in Rochester, as a commercial traveler (salesman). By managing to become the official time table publisher for the Seaboard Airline Railroad, he got an annual pass to use the trains to Petersburg. He used this advantage to court Jennie Wood, and the two were married on June 10, 1879, at Five Forks Courthouse, Virginia. Stilwell next became a commercial traveler for Travelers' Insurance Co. of Hartford, Connecticut. While there, he invented a coupon annuity life-insurance policy which was adopted by the Penn Mutual and Travelers' Life Companies and then came into use in modified form with every life-insurance company in the U.S. He became the state agent for the Travelers' Insurance Company for Rhode Island and Connecticut for a time, then moved to Missouri in 1887. Stilwell left an extremely successful career with Travelers' Insurance to venture to St. Louis, but within one year he formed the one million dollar Guardian Trust Co. with headquarters in Kansas City. Guardian Trust built homes for which the buyers put up 20% in cash and then paid off the balance in ten annual installments. After initial success in this venture, the company quickly moved into industrial mortgage banking with similar success. Stilwell's first investment in railroads was in the Kansas City Suburban Belt in 1888. He went on to build more than 2300 miles of new railroad in his lifetime, founding some forty cities, towns, and villages and adding more than a billion dollars to the economy of the Southwest. He organized 41 companies of various kinds, with a combined investment of $60 million (in 1885 - 1928 dollars) and lived to see them pay out more than $160 million in dividends and profits. Most of his backers profited hugely. Stilwell backed every endeavor with his own funds, but he never became lastingly rich. His crowning achievement was the Port Arthur railroute from Kansas City to the Gulf, begun in 1890. Stilwell designed the railroad, financed it, and served as its president. The railroad runs through the richest region of the Southwest and connects many other railroutes. Stilwell founded Port Arthur as the ocean terminus of his new Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad, which later became the Kansas City Southern Railroad. Stilwell also found the time to write and publish books, plays, and even a hymn. One of his books, Cannibals of Finance, attacked Gates, Harriman, and Thalmann, the men who forced the KCP&G (Kansas City Southern) into receivership over a forty dollar unpaid printing bill. Arthur Stilwell was a financier and philanthropist, but he was also a spiritualist who claimed that all of his writing was dictated to him by voices from the spiritual world. In his book Live and Grow Young he had this to say about what he would call his "weirdest hunch of all": All my life, even when a child, I have received messages from the spirit world and they have greatly influenced my life. . . . . I was warned by my nightly advisors not to make Galveston the terminal of the Kansas City Southern Road because that city was destined to be destroyed by a tidal wave, which prediction was fulfilled, tragically, four years later. Thereupon, I constructed the City of Port Arthur, Texas, and built the Port Arthur Ship Canal and harbor under the same guidance, not deviating from the plans revealed to me in any way. Stilwell died of apoplexy on September 26, 1928, after long suffering from ill health and persecution by unscrupulous business foes. He was 68. Less than two weeks later, on October 9, 1928, his wife committed suicide. Dressed in her best clothes, she walked out the window of their twelfth floor Manhattan apartment.

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