H.E. Byrne, Smith County, TX

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Submitted by Leroy B. Butler, leroybutler@hotmail.com 16 May 2001
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Title: The Encyclopedia of Texas
Publisher: Texas Development Bureau, Dallas, Texas
Compiled and Edited by Ellis A. Davis and Edwin H. Grobe
Date: 1923

H.E. Byrne, banker, educator, author and business man of Ft. Worth
has probably started more young men and women on the high road to
success than any one individual in Texas today. As president of Tyler
Commercial College of Tyler, Texas, which institution he founded in
1900, Mr. Byrne has seen tangible evidence of his success in the
work accomplished by more than thirty thousand students who obtained
their business training in his school.

Commencing in a small way, Tyler Commercial College has grown until
now it occupies all of a large three story brick building especially
constructed for the school, and which is one of the most thoroughly
modern establishments in the United States devoted to commercial
college education. It is especially well lighted and ventilated and
constructed throughout with a view of facilitating the work of the
teachers and pupils. The average annual enrollment in the various
departments is over four thousand and every phase of business activity
is covered in the curriculum. Besides the usual course of bookkeeping,
shorthand, business arithmetic, commercial law, etc., taught in the
average business school, the Tyler Commercial College furnishes courses
in cotton classing and grading, marketing of cotton, business adminis-
tration and finance and railway telegraphy and station work. Each
department is under the direction of capable expert instructors who
are especially versed in the subject taught. An average of thirty
teaches is required at all times.

Besides the Tyler Commercial College, Mt. Byrne also is head of the
Byrne Publishing Company and the Byrne-Roberts Loan Company of Tyler.
His publishing establishment has one of the largest job printing
plants in Texas and besides printing for the school turns out bank
and commercial printing, also high grade art calendars and during the
season maintains several salesmen on the road disposing of its pro-
ducts.

The Byrne Publishing Company of Chicago was organized by Mr. Byrne
in 1916 and publishes eight different text books for the commercial
schools and denominational schools. Mr. Byrne is the author of all
these works, some of which have required from five to eight editions
and enjoyed an exceptionally wide sale both in this country and
abroad.

The Texas Finance Corporation of Dallas was organized by Mr. Byrne in
1918 for financing automobile dealers in North Texas. The Houston
Finance Corporation handles the same line of business in South Texas.
The Fort Worth Finance Corporation handles the same line of business
for Fort Worth and west Texas. All three of these corporations are
meeting with splendid results.

Mr. Byrne, along with T.B. Butler of Tyler, was one of the organizers
of the Guarantee State Bank in Tyler in 1909 and served as director
and vice president of the bank for several years. In 1920, he acquired
a controlling interest and became president of the Security State Bank
of Fort Worth. Mr. Byrne is a tireless worker. He receives daily reports
from the nine concerns of which he is president and regularly inspects
each of them personally.

Mr. Byrne is a native of Missouri and was born at Edina in Knox County,
December 14, 1870, a son of John Byrne, a farmer. He was reared on a
farm and received his preliminary education in the public schools of
Charlton County, Missouri later attending a normal and business
college at Chillicothe he then was elected head of the commercial
department for the Patterson Institute at Hillsboro Texas, and in the
latter year moved to Tyler, Texas and organized the Tyler Commercial
College there and of which he is still acting head. While residing in
Tyler, Mr. Byrne was president of the Chamber of Commerce for three
years and took an active interest in all the civic movements and
undertakings of the east Texas city. He was a member of the Dallas,
Fort Worth and Chicago Chambers of Commerce, also the Texas Chamber of
Commerce. He was a charter member of the League of Nations to enforce
peace, also a member of the American Emigration League.

In 1914, Mr. Byrne was named a member of the American Commission of
Municipal, Executive and Civic Leaders appointed by the Southern
Commercial Congress to investigate civic conditions in European cities.
He went abroad and was in Paris was declared between Austria and Serbia.
Mr. Byrne was present at the American Embassy when the first official
notification of the declaration was read there in the presence of
Joffre, Viviani, and other notables. While in London Mr. Byrne delivered
an address on education at an international education convention which
was commented on very favorably by the British press.