The larger than life sized statue of William Marsh Rice was commissioned by the Rice Board of Trustees in 1928. It was designed and cast in bronze by British sculptor John Angel and unveiled and dedicated in June of 1930. It originally rested atop a base of pink Texas granite in the center of the Academic Quad and contained the ashes of the founder. In 2024 the Academic Quad was redesigned and the statue moved to its present location. Mr. Rice’s ashes were reinterred in the Rice Family Plot at Glenwood Cemetery.
WMR Executive Summary
The life of William Marsh Rice is intimately connected with the early development of the city of Houston. Rice’s involvement with Houston's civic life spanned a period of some sixty years. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1816, he arrived in Houston in 1838, only two years after the city was founded. For the next twenty-five years, Houston served both as Rice's home and as the base for his wide-ranging business interests. Beginning with a mercantile operation in partnership with Ebenezer Nichols, Rice did a thriving business supplying the cotton plantations along the Brazos River valley. Although never a planter himself, Rice owned a number of slaves, both personally and as a partner in Rice & Nichols, and benefited directly from their labor. He provided private banking services to other businesses in Houston, helping to fund the growing commercial and civic infrastructure of the young city. As his merchant business grew, Rice expanded into interlocking fields that all contributed to the growth of his fortune and the maturation of the region’s economy: land, lumber, and transportation. He invested in the development of rail transportation, and in the dredging of Buffalo Bayou. He acquired tens of thousands of acres of land, in town lots, farm lands, and timber lands across forty-five Texas counties and four Louisiana parishes.
After the Civil War Rice left Houston for New Jersey, then New York, but he visited Houston regularly and maintained and expanded his substantial businesses and real estate investments in the city until his death in 1900. In 1891 he chartered and endowed what would become the William M. Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science, and Art (today Rice University). At his death he bequeathed nearly his entire fortune to the Institute, leaving his greatest legacy to Houston and the world.