Bio: W. H. Johnson; Caddo Parish, Louisiana
Submitted by Mike Miller
Date: 1999-2000





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W. H. Johnson.  As president of the Caddo Transfer and Warehouse Company and
the Tri-State Transit Company, W. H. Johnson has realized a practical vision
formed more than twenty years ago, and has perfected a modern service on
improved highways with motor bus and motor truck facilities that have
attracted the attention of automobile transportation circles throughout the
United States.

Mr. Johnson first engaged in the transfer business at Shreveport in 1903. He
was very young at the time, and had practically no capital.  At that time the
motor car industry was in its infancy and the construction of good roads had
barely commenced.  The transfer business was dependent on horse and mule
power, and was also dependent on weather and the conditions of the unpaved
roadways.  Country merchants remote from railroads frequently had to wait days
for the roads to dry.  In twenty years Mr. Johnson through the Caddo Transfer
and Warehouse Company and the Tri-State Transit Company has built up a service
that is practically letter perfect over a territory extending fifty miles
around Shreveport in every direction.  These companies operate a total of
sixty bus schedules in and out of Shreveport, there being 600 busses for
passenger service operated almost hourly from Shreveport to Marshall,
Mansfield, Vivian, Ida and Gilliam, affording business men, farmers and others
a transportation service fully equal to that supplied many suburban
communities around the largest cities of the country.  Likewise, the freight
truck service runs on regular schedules to all the intervening communities
between Shreveport and Marshall, Texas, and similarly over the forty-mile trip
to Mansfield, to Vivian, and a number of towns on the Gilliam division.  The
companies have several bonded warehouses in Shreveport, affording
manufacturers and wholesalers' an opportunity to distribute their goods in a
radius of more than forty miles from Shreveport by prompt, efficient and
dependable service.  The central passenger depot of the Tri-State Transit
Company is in the heart of the downtown district and in the same block with
the newspaper offices, which utilize the bus service for the interurban
distribution of morning and afternoon newspapers, making it possible for
thousands of farmers and other rural dwellers to receive their papers
regularly as dwellers in the city.  The Caddo Parish School Board has yearly
contracts with the company to transport children to and from school.

Mr. Johnson in twenty years has achieved a great success, not only in a
financial way, but in performing helpful service for others and in adding to
the advancement and upbuilding of his home city.  His associates in these
companies are: J. K. Walker, former secretary-manager of the Shreveport
Chamber of Commerce; E. H. Craig, superintendent, a former railway man; and
Pierre Schon, who was a former executive of the General Motors Company.

A History of Louisiana, (vol. 2), p. 202, by Henry E. Chambers.  Published by
The American Historical Society, Inc., Chicago and New York, 1925.