Arthur Pope Duggan

DUGGAN, ARTHUR POPE (1876-1935). Arthur Pope Duggan, lawyer, West Texas promoter, and legislator, son of Alston and Eliza Permelia (Malone) Duggan, was born on September 21, 1876, in Hays County, Texas. In 1882 the family moved to San Saba, where Alston later served as county clerk. Arthur attended school in San Saba and college at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M University), where he received a bachelor of civil engineering degree in 1895. He received a bachelor of laws degree in 1898 from the University of Texas. He subsequently worked in a law office in Galveston and in an abstract office in Cripple Creek, Colorado, before opening a law office in the new town of Stamford, Texas, in the fall of 1900. On June 18, 1902, in Austin, he married Sarah Elizabeth Harral, a niece of Maj. George W. Littlefield. Two children were born to the Duggans.

From 1904 to 1911 Duggan owned the Duggan Abstract Company in Denton. In the summer of 1912 he became sales manager of the Littlefield Lands Company, formed to sell the Yellow House Ranch in Lamb County to settlers and to develop the town of Littlefield, where Duggan became president of the school board, of the first bank, and of the chamber of commerce. In 1918 he resigned as sales manager and was commissioned a captain in the Texas National Guard for service in World War I; he was trained at Leon Springs.

After the war he returned to Littlefield, where he served as vice president and then president of the West Texas Chamber of Commerce (1925-27). Duggan worked untiringly for a university in West Texas. He helped organize the Littlefield Masonic Lodge and the Littlefield Rotary Club. He served as the Democratic senator from the Thirtieth District to the Forty-third Texas Legislature (1933-34) and to the Forty-fourth Legislature in 1935. He died of heart failure on September 6, 1935, in Gonzales. He and his wife were both Presbyterians, and both are buried in the State Cemetery in Austin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Seymour V. Connor, ed., Builders of the Southwest (Lubbock: Southwest Collection, Texas Technological College, 1959). David B. Gracy II, Littlefield Lands (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). Members of the Texas Legislature, 1846-1962 (Austin, 1962).

Alice Duggan Gracy

"DUGGAN, ARTHUR POPE." The Handbook of Texas Online. [Accessed Fri Nov 21 15:46:51 US/Central 2003 ].