At age 20, Mr. Jones moved from Tennessee to Dallas to work at his uncle M. T. Jones’s largest lumberyard. M. T. owned sawmills, lumberyards and timberland throughout Texas and lived in Houston, the home base of his vast operations. Mr. Jones would later recall in a speech, “It may be that my uncle and I were too much of the same temperament to be entirely congenial, but after he found that I had energy and interest for business, as well as for play, we got on better and, I am glad to say, were fast friends long before he died at St. Paul’s Sanitarium in June 1898. In fact, he named me one of his executors and that took me to Houston, the headquarters of his business.”

Mr. Jones’s 1898 arrival, the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the discovery of oil at Spindletop in 1901 changed Houston’s future. The hurricane shifted the region’s inevitable development from Galveston to Houston; Spindletop marked the beginning of the area’s evolution into the nation’s petrochemical capital; and Jesse Jones began building the city that would accommodate the explosive growth.

He started building small homes south of downtown that he sold on unique, long-term installment plans. Then he began building Houston’s first skyscrapers, including the 10-story Houston Chronicle Building, which brought him a half interest in the newspaper, and the Texas Company Building, which helped make Texaco and the petroleum industry a permanent part of the city’s business community. He continued to add office buildings, movie theaters and hotels to the central business district in time for the opening of the Houston Ship Channel in 1914.

In addition to Houston’s foremost developer, Mr. Jones became a prominent civic leader. He raised Houston’s half of the funds for the Ship Channel (the federal government paid the rest in one of the nation’s first public/private partnerships) and was the first chairman of the Houston Harbor Board. The opening of the Ship Channel internationalized Houston almost overnight and elevated the South’s still struggling post-Civil War economy.