Warner E. Williams. While now one of the great trunk railway systems of the country, the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad was largely developed as a Kansas corporation. The main offices of the company at Kansas are at Parsons, where 2,200 of its employes reside. The different lines of the road converge and diverge from that point in six directions: To Hannibal and St. Louis, Missouri; to Kansas City, Missouri; to Junction City, Kansas; to Joplin, Missouri, to Denison, Texas; and to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
For several years the general manager of the system with headquarters at Parsons was Warner E. Williams, who had recently been transferred to Dallas, Texas, where he began his career as a railroad man and where he is now general manager of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway of Texas.
Mr. Williams was born at Houston, Texas, May 29, 1864, attended the public schools at Houston, and as a boy worked as a messenger in a law office. He was similarly employed in a wholesale grocery house at Houston, but in 1881 at the age of seventeen he became check clerk at the freight house of the International and Great Northern Railroad at Taylor, Texas. During his thirty-five years of experience he had been steadily promoted in the scale of responsibility. At Palestine, Texas, he was roadmaster’s clerk, filled other places in the transportation office, was chief clerk in the superintendent’s office, secretary to the general manager and secretary of the receivers’ department. He was then promoted to purchasing agent and general store keeper, but in 1897 he left the International & Great Northern and became chief clerk to the general superintendent of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas at Dallas. He was promoted to car accountant and in 1901 was transferred to Greenville, Texas, as trainmaster. In 1902 he became superintendent at Greenville and in 1905 superintendent at Denison, Texas. He was subsequently assigned as superintendent at Sedalia, Missouri, and at St. Louis, but in 1911 was made general superintendent of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway and in 1912 located at Parsons. Mr. Williams was a resident of Parsons for several years and in February, 1915, was made general manager, a post he held until recently when he returned to Dailas.