The McFaddin-Ward House, home to the prominent McFaddin family, was built in 1906 in the prestigious neighborhood around Calder Avenue. This entertaining volume tells the story of this house and the people who lived in it, bringing out the personalities of the principal inhabitants--W. P. H. McFaddin, his second wife Ida, their daughter Mamie, and Mamie's husband Carroll Ward.

How did they do it? How did a profligate who killed a deputy sheriff before reforming, a mining engineer who went AWOL from the Austrian Navy, and three East Texas drillers join forces with other equally colorful characters to drill on Spindletop hill? Giant Under the Hill is a scholarly work firmly rooted in the narrative tradition, a great story intriguingly told by three Beaumont historians: Jo Ann Stiles, Ellen Rienstra, and Judith Linsley. Using material collected over decades, much of it never before published, they bring to life the efforts of Pattillo Higgins, Anthony Lucas, Al and...