"William E. Benson" (1876, Elmore County, Ala-14-October, 1915Tallapoosa County, Ala.).

A graduate of Howard University, William attempted to establish a stable community of landowning African American farmers. The nucleus of the enterprise was the Kowaliga Industrial Community,which he founded in 1897 or 1898.By 1915, he had organized the Dixie Industrial Company,which owned ten thousand acres of land, a cottonseed-oil mill, a timber operation, a general store, a turpentine plant and 15 miles of railroad that linked the community to the larger society.The ideology of self-help was put into practice as African Americans built their own farms and the buildings that housed the community's businesses.