Samuel Lloyd Noble

Samuel Lloyd Noble, known as Lloyd Noble (30 November 1896 in Ardmore, Oklahoma – 14 February 1950 in Houston, Texas), was an oilman and philanthropist, founder of the Noble Corporation and the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation. He attended Southeastern Normal College in Durant, Oklahoma and the University of Oklahoma. After his father died, Noble enlisted in the U. S. Navy in 1918, and was discharged the following year after the armistice was signed that ended World War I.

Lloyd Noble began his career in the early years of oil drilling in the state, founding the Noble Drilling Company on April 1, 1921. The company began using Hughes Simplex rock bits created by the Hughes Tool Company in the 1920s and was noted for adopting new technologies. With his wealth, Noble founded the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, charged with undertaking philanthropy and advancing agricultural practices and science.

Biography

Samuel Lloyd Noble, known as Lloyd Noble, was born on November 30, 1896, in present day Ardmore, Oklahoma. He was the second of three children of Samuel Roberts and Hattie Edith Skinner Noble.  

The same year Lloyd was born, his father and uncle founded Noble Brothers Hardware. At that time, Ardmore was one of the largest cotton ginning centers in the United States. Young Lloyd, who often worked as a stock boy, took note of the work ethic and moral compass of the farmers and ranchers who frequented the family hardware store.

Upon graduation from public school in 1914, Lloyd earned a teaching certificate from Southeastern State Normal School (now Southeastern Oklahoma State University), and for the next two years taught in the rural public schools of Carter County. He returned to school at the University of Oklahoma in 1916 but did not graduate.

Lloyd Noble married Vivian Bilby in 1924. They had three children: Sam, Ed and Ann. After Vivian died in 1936, he raised his young children with a strong work ethic and family values with help from his mother, Hattie Noble, and housekeeper, Nora “Shaffie” Shaffer.  

When Lloyd was 17 years old, oil was discovered in Healdton, Oklahoma, a small town about 20 miles west of Ardmore. The Healdton oil field quickly became one of the largest oil discoveries in the continental United States. Having inherited his family's entrepreneurial spirit, 24-year-old Lloyd convinced his mother to cosign on a loan for $15,000 in 1921 so he could buy his first drilling rig.  

Through a combination of good fortune and ability to form highly organized crews and a willingness to embrace new technology, Lloyd went from a single drilling rig to having rigs across the U.S. and into Canada within 50 years. While Lloyd’s oil business was booming into the 1930s, his fellow Oklahomans who farmed and ranched were suffering.  

Lloyd found enjoyment in personal aviation and frequently flew from his home base in Ardmore to his oil rigs across the country. From this bird’s-eye view, he could see that the farmland of Oklahoma was changing before his eyes.  

When a once in a lifetime drought hit the Great Plains, the Dust Bowl was born. Topsoil blew away, destroying 100 million acres of farmland, and with it the livelihood that so many depended.  

Lloyd, once a humble stock boy serving farmers and ranchers, now felt uniquely positioned to help these people, and his home state. Lloyd famously wrote, “The land must continue to provide for our food, clothing and shelter long after the oil is gone.”  

In 1945, Lloyd took a bold step toward a solution to the crisis he had observed. He established The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, named after his father, who he described as the most charitable individual he knew. The Noble Foundation began humbly with a group of soil scientists who tested soil for farmers and ranchers.  

This evolved into research, then consultation and educational programming as more people asked the experts how to improve production on their farms and take care of the land.  In 1950, only five short years after starting the Noble Foundation, Lloyd Noble, at only 53 years old, suffered a fatal heart attack. He left the majority of his estate to the Noble Foundation and enabled the organization to grow and adapt to meet the needs of each generation of farmers and ranchers.

Today, Noble Research Institute, guided in large part by Lloyd Noble’s descendants, continues to strive to advance agriculture and produce lasting benefits for all mankind.

Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation

Concern for improving agriculture to avoid another Dust Bowl was one of the reasons he founded the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, devoted to agricultural sustainability. In 1950 he said, "No man can have assurance for himself and his posterity living for himself alone. In order to have things for one’s self, one must join in the defense of those same things for others.”

Before his early death, Samuel Lloyd Noble established the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation in 1945, a foundation dedicated to advancing agricultural science. Today the Foundation is the largest private agricultural and plant science research institution in the United States. It is the largest private foundation in the state and is in the top 50 in the U. S. in the size of its assets. Service to a greater good was the founding principle for the Foundation. Noble, flying over acres of The Dust Bowl-devastated farmland, conceived of the foundation’s mission to advance agricultural science and practice in a sustainable way, thereby safeguarding the land and soils for future generations.

Noble is recognized as one of the fifty most influential residents of Oklahoma in the 20th century.

See also

• Lloyd Noble Center
• Ardmore, Oklahoma
• Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History

External links

• Voices of Oklahoma interview with Ann Noble Brown. First person interview conducted on August 29, 2011, with Ann Noble Brown, daughter of Samuel Lloyd Noble.