BusinessTN

Thanks mostly to small gains in stock prices and low interest rates, Tennessee’s richest got only a little richer over the past year. This expanded list of 20, which includes six billionaires, ranges in estimated wealth from $300 million to $2.6 billion. In addition to our institutional knowledge, we based our estimates on information from well-placed sources and analysis of such documents as SEC filings, property listings and valuation reports on comparable assets.

Martha Rivers Ingram
Source of Wealth: Distribution * $2.6 Billion
Nashville
With a net worth edging higher during the past few years, Martha Ingram this year continued a steady decline on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people to number 228, down 23 spots from last year, when her net worth was estimated at $2.5 billion. With distribution still the core of wealth created by late husband Bronson Ingram, she remains Nashville’s leading philanthropist and patron of the arts. (The $120 million Schermerhorn Symphony hall bearing the name of her late friend, Nashville Symphony Orchestra conductor Kenneth Schermerhorn, is scheduled for opening next September.) Ingram has presided as chairman of Ingram Industries, which includes Ingram Book, Ingram Marine and Ingram Insurance, since her husband’s death in 1995. Son John runs Ingram Book division, while son Orrin controls a fleet of 4,000 barges and hundreds of tugboats on major rivers. She spun off Ingram Entertainment to son David in 1997. Ingram also is a board member at Weyerhaeuser and AmSouth BankCorp.

Fred Smith
Source of Wealth: Shipping * $2.1 Billion
Memphis
The grandson of a riverboat captain and son of the founder of Greyhound Bus Lines (who also dabbled in cotton, pedigreed beef and Toddle House restaurants), Smith is the brainchild behind $29 billion (revenue) transportation giant FedEx. Now 60, he has run the company for more than three decades.

His entrepreneurship began at age 15 when he and friends started a recording studio. He later turned the first installment of his inheritance into $750,000 in liquid assets and bought an Arkansas-based aviation firm.

Forbes recently ranked Smith the 306th wealthiest man in the world at $2.1 billion. That’s up from $975 million in 1999. He owns over 15 million shares of FedEx stock, which in March topped $100 a share.

The father of 10 children, Smith is a minority owner in the Washington Redskins professional football franchise. He’s also a low-profile Hollywood player—an investor in Alcon Entertainment, maker of movies, including My Dog Skip, Chasing Liberty and Insomnia.

Smith was ranked as the 27th highest paid executive in America last year by Forbes with total compensation of $36.4 million. He’s the former national co-chairman of the World War II memorial, meaning he gave a lot of money to that cause. A board member of libertarian think tank The Cato Institute, Smith also gives generously to Republican candidates.

Thomas Frist Jr. & Family
Source of Wealth: Hospitals * $1.8 Billion
Nashville
Frist’s fortune stems from his position as the largest individual shareholder of HCA, the hospital chain he helped create. According to the company’s most recent proxy statement, Frist owns 4.1% of HCA, the nation’s largest hospital operator. His 16.9 million shares are worth about $907 million. The uniform company that outfits the staff working in his 40,000-square-foot Belle Meade home appears to have Frist as its only residential customer in Nashville. Frist flies one of the very few seaplanes landing at Center Hill Lake, where he owns a 10,000-square-foot home. His aircraft portfolio also includes a Cessna Citation jet. His wife Patricia and sons Tommy and Billy recently have been buying real estate as Frist Capital Partners, a Nashville-based investment firm. The family’s Frist Foundation has been focusing on funding the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, which increasingly has been in need of capital.

Mason Hawkins
Source of Wealth: Money Mmanagement * $1.8 Billion
Memphis
Just as Einstein appreciated the wonders of compound returns, so do Mason Hawkins and clients of his Southeastern Asset Management. Thanks to growing the value of customer accounts on average more than 17% annually for 30 years, the highly disciplined, value-style investment management firm now manages more than $31 billion in several Longleaf Partners mutual funds and another 220 individual accounts. These assets generate an estimated $250 million in fee income for a business that should enjoy a 60%+ pre-tax profit margin. Based on other industry transactions, the firm easily would fetch well more than $1 billion were it to be sold. The founder and presumed majority owner of Southeastern, Hawkins is reported to have nearly all his net worth invested alongside his clients. Conspicuously absent from Forbes’ annual list of billionaires, Hawkins should have at least $1 billion of personal capital under management based on his track record and fee structure.

Cal Turner Jr. & Family
Source of Wealth: Retail * $1.2 Billion
Nashville
While an unpleasant development, Turner’s agreement in April to shell out a $1 million civil penalty to settle the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into his company will hardly dent his personal finances. (The payment settles a 2002 lawsuit by the SEC following Dollar General’s restatement of earnings between 1998 and 2000, which involved creative accounting of outdated Omron cash registers). Turner joined Dollar General in 1965, which his father and grandfather started in 1939. Although he’s no longer chairman and chief executive at the discount retailer, he and his brother Steve control nearly $900 million in stock of the company that now spans 7,551 stores. Turner and his family own more than $16 million in real estate in the greater Nashville area.

Kemmons Wilson Family
Source of Wealth: Lodging, Investment * $1.2 Billion
Memphis
The sons of Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson now run the state’s largest locally based private equity firm Kemmons Wilson Companies, which has $1 billion in assets. The family business, led by brothers Spence Wilson, Kemmons Wilson Jr. and Robert Wilson, still is involved in the lodging industry with Wilson Hotel Management Co. The family business also includes the world’s largest single-site timeshare resort, commercial and residential real estate developments, and a fixed-based aviation operation. Spence Wilson was a director of Union Planters Corp., which recently merged into Regions Financial Corp. where Kemmons Wilson Jr. served as director. Together, the brothers now serve as directors of the merged Regions Financial, owning shares of the financial services company valued at more than $24 million.

J.R. “Pitt” Hyde III
Source of Wealth: Retail * $915 Million
Memphis
Hyde’s wealth is credited with boosting Memphis’s growing biopharmaceutical industry. Having amassed his fortune with retailer AutoZone, the company he founded, Hyde now invests much of his time and money in the biotech industry. His 9.8 million shares of Memphis-based pharmaceutical company GTx are worth about $91.3 million. Hyde serves as chairman of GTx. He helped found private equity firm MB Ventures, which has invested in biotech and medical device companies that, for the most part, have increased in valuation since the firm’s investment. His 646,948 shares of AutoZone are worth about $58 million. His wealth is diversified among money managers across the United States. Hyde owns 95,600 shares of FedEx, for which he serves as a director, and that stake is valued at about $8.6 million. He and wife Barbara were among the original investors in the Memphis Grizzlies NBA team. Barbara Hyde also leads the Hyde Family Foundation, which has a fair market value of $69 million, according to the foundation’s most recent IRS filing.

James W. McGlothlin
Source of Wealth: Mining * $900 Million
Bristol
Jim McGlothlin and his wife Frances recently said they would donate artwork and funding for an endowment, together worth well above $100 million, to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Their bequest includes works by American artists Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. With a residence in Tennessee, Jim McGlothlin is heavily involved with businesses based in Virginia. He earned his fortune in coal and serves as chairman and chief executive of Bristol, Va.-based United Co., which is involved in financial services, oil and gas, industrial supply distribution and golf courses. The company also owns The Olde Farm, an exclusive golf course in Bristol, Va. McGlothlin owns a residence in Austin, Texas, and owns Gulf-front real estate in Naples, Fla. His family foundation, led by his brother Tom McGlothlin, has roughly $21 million in assets and is focused on funding education, health care and the arts.

Jack Lupton
Source of Wealth: Bottling * $880 Million
Chattanooga
The man who transformed downtown Chattanooga through his charitable Lyndhurst Foundation, Lupton started humbly at his grandfather’s Great Western Coca-Cola Bottling Co. in 1954 as a bottle washer. After rising through the ranks to the top post, he grew the company and after 30 years sold it to Coke for $1.4 billion in 1986, splitting the proceeds with sister Elizabeth Lupton-Davenport. In an interview that year with The Chattanooga Times, Lupton defended his swashbuckling attitude to city-building: “As long as you are out there taking risks, you’re going to make some mistakes. We’ve got so much of the best in this community now it’s spooky. Go find me a damn Hunter Museum somewhere else.”

R.B. Davenport III & Family
Source of Wealth: Restaurants, Bottling * $825 Million
Chattanooga
R.B. Davenport III is one of three sons of the late R.B. Davenport Jr., who started the Krystal fast food restaurant chain in 1932. The elder Davenport lived only into his 30s. The family grew the business, known for its small square hamburgers, eventually selling it in 1997 for $50 million. Son Robert M. Davenport would later open the double drive-thru fast food restaurant Central Park. For some time, the family was also heavily invested in the Wendy’s fast food restaurant chain. The family’s larger wealth, though, stems from the marriage of R.B. Davenport III to Elizabeth Lupton, who with her brother Jack inherited the Great Coca-Cola bottling company and became famously wealthy upon selling the company back to Coke. Upon Ms. Lupton-Davenport’s passing, she left the Davenport family $750 million. The Davenports were among the most visible families bankrolling the massive lobbying push in the mid-’90s to eliminate the estate tax, which has been stuck in the craw of America’s moneyed class since its origination in 1916. Davenport and most of his extended family reside on top of Lookout Mountain, where the family has been established since the early 1900s. A large family, it’s hard not to pass a Davenport family home while driving in the area.

Summerfield K. Johnston Jr.
Source of Wealth: Bottling * $810 Million
Chattanooga
The 72-year-old heir to the Coca-Cola bottling fortune (his grandfather was the company’s first bottler) and the largest shareholder of Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Enterprises, Johnston spends most of his time on a vast family farm northeast of Chattanooga. Past chairman of the U.S. Polo Association, Johnston is an avid horse breeder, outdoorsman and arts collector. He likes fishing around the world, quail hunting on his 10,000-acre property in Central Florida, and enjoys American Western art. He still sits on the board of CCE, maintains stock holdings in Coca-Cola Co. and SunTrust Bank, where he was a director.

John Hull Dobbs & Family
Source of Wealth: Cars & Catering * $800 Million
Memphis
John Hull Dobbs is the patriarch of a Memphis family with entrepreneurial roots in a wide variety of industries, including multiple Ford automobile dealerships, a publicly traded airport catering business, managed care companies, and an Anheuser Busch distributor in New Mexico. Dobbs Automotive Group, which was the seventh largest dealer group in the United States, sold in 1997 to Republic Industries for about $200 million of the company’s stock. The family’s airline catering business, which was selling 2.5 million airline meals annually in 1947, sold to Squibb Corp. in 1968. Dobbs’ other foray into food was with restaurants Dobbs House and Toddle House. The Dobbs family has ownership in Three Rivers Holding, which includes Medicaid HMO companies with roughly 225,000 members in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee. Dobbs now runs Dobbs Management Service, a private equity firm in Memphis focused on supporting the family’s business investments. The firm’s Web site says the Dobbs family has “in excess of $100 million available for private business investing activities.”

Jim “Big Jim” Haslam & Family
Source of Wealth: Oil * $800 Million
Kknoxville
Big Jim’s Pilot Corp., the owner of the largest U.S. travel center company, operates 261 travel centers, licenses 13 locations and generated $7.2 billion in sales in 2004. Pilot Travel Centers expects to sell over 3.5 billion gallons of petroleum this year—big business at a time when gas prices are on the rise. Haslam owns half of the company, and son Jimmy III is chief executive, while son Bill serves as Knoxville’s mayor. Jimmy III serves as a director of Memphis-based First Horizon and Maryville-based Ruby Tuesday, and his stock ownership in the companies is worth a combined $4 million. Big Jim supports the Republican Party with his own money and has led fundraising efforts, reportedly kicking off Bob Corker’s U.S. Senate campaign fundraising in November 2004 by hosting a $1,000-a-head event for about 60 guests. Haslam serves on the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees and has been a generous financial donor, giving millions to the school over the years. He owns homes in Knoxville, Hilton Head and Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Spencer Hays
Source of Wealth: Direct Sales/Apparel * $800 Million
Nashville
The enthusiastic owner of Nashville direct sales business conglomerate Southwestern/Great American Inc. who has willed his entire stake in the company (worth hundreds of millions of dollars) to its employees, Hays controls more than a dozen privately held companies, including Athlon Sports and Tom James, the world’s largest manufacturer of tailored men’s clothing. He is now putting the finishing touches on his luxurious 8,000-square-foot-plus mansion in Belle Meade, which houses an impressive collection of Rembrandts, Picassos and Van Goghs. Hays also has properties in New York (Leonard Bernstein’s former home on the Upper East Side and a $6.9 million, 10-room cooperative on East 72nd Avenue, to name a few), as well as a home in Europe.

Forrest Preston
Source of Wealth: Nursing Homes * $600 Million
Cleveland
Thirty-five years after opening his first convalescent center in his hometown of Cleveland, Tenn., Forrest Preston still owns and chairs Life Care Centers of America, which operates roughly 270 nursing, assisted living and home care facilities generating more than an estimated $1.7 billion in annual revenue. In the late 1990s, Life Care leased and managed 100 facilities from Meditrust, a then-large health care REIT. He controls numerous entities that own health care properties, and he owns The Media Resource Group, the former Life Care communications group spun out as a studio to produce audio and video recordings. Preston’s numerous land holdings include the Mill Run Investors property on Cleveland’s Anatole Lane, where he has a large barn and land for a subdivision. In 1999, Preston grossed $63 million in cash plus equity warrants on the sale of Life Care’s institutional pharmacy unit. In earlier years, he co-owned Hospital Publications Inc. and Consolidated Resources Group.

Billy Dunavant
Source of Wealth: Cotton * $580 Million
Memphis
Set to retire last month, Billy Dunavant is the lead owner of Memphis-based cotton merchandiser Dunavant Enterprises, which handles more than four million bales of U.S. and foreign cotton per year. The company’s annual revenue reaches more than $1.6 billion, and it also owns a commodities trading company, real estate development companies and a truck brokerage company. Dunavant was involved with the first sale of U.S. cotton to Mainland China in 1972, along with the largest sale by any company to China in October 1990. The company operates offices and warehouses all over the world, from Brownsville, Tenn., to Turkmenistan. Dunavant is a founding partner of the Memphis Angels investment group, which among other things owns 13% of IPIX Corp, a provider of 360-degree imaging technology. Shares of the company have steadily dropped during the past year, falling from about $10 a share to about $3 a share.

Jim Clayton
Source of Wealth: Founder, Clayton Homes/FSB Bancshares * $520 Million
Knoxville
The man who sold his manufactured housing business to Warren Buffet in 2003 for $454 million in cash is about to put some of his money to good use. Clayton is one of roughly 10 investors who are expected to contribute at least $35 million to form a yet unnamed East Tennessee venture capital firm, which through its affiliation with New Jersey-based Battelle Ventures will attempt to commercialize area scientists’ research. Part of Clayton’s wealth stems from BankFirst, of which he was a 40% owner before it sold to BB&T in 2000. After taking a short breather from banking, along with $85 million in proceeds from that sale, Clayton is back in the game as the sole owner of FSB Bancshares (currently at $113 million in deposits).

W. Allan Jones
Source of Wealth: Check Cashing * $500 Million
Cleveland
Jones is the founder of the payday advance industry (see previous story). His 400-acre home site in Cleveland has an air-conditioned muscle car garage highlighted by his $300,000 Maybach; an on-site greenhouse with a full-time horticulturist; a three-story tree house; and a regulation-sized football field with lights, a scoreboard and supporting field house and stands. Jones hosted the country’s first-ever private college football game, raising $100,000 for University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

Jones owns and operates the Crescent H Ranch, a 233-acre commercial dude ranch and western lodge in Jackson Hole, Wyo., home to seven miles of spring creeks, ponds and the Snake River—a fisherman’s paradise. In all, Jones owns 433 acres in Jackson Hole. In the shadows of the Teton Range, it borders 1,300 acres of national forest. He bought it at auction in 2000 for $12.3 million, but its value has shot through the roof since. The seller? Fellow Tennessean John “Thunder” Thornton, who paid $52 million for a much larger parcel in 1997, then sold several multi-million dollar lots.

After his 136-foot Mefasa yacht previously owned by King Juan Carlos of Spain burned in a fire near Palm Beach, Jones bought a 157-foot boat, named after his wife, Janie, that was under construction for NASCAR racing kingpin Rick Hendrick. Its estimated price tag is $24 million. The boat has a 61-inch plasma television in the lounge. In the pilothouse are nine additional televisions on nine satellite receivers for thorough tracking of Saturday college football games. It’s available for charter for $175,000 per week ($25,000 a day). Jones expects to make $1 million leasing the boat this summer alone. Racecar driver Jimmie Johnson honeymooned on it. This May, the boat was in Monaco hosting wealthy Russians attending the Grand Prix. It later docked at the Cannes film festival.

For use in his businesses, Jones owns two planes, a Challenger 600 ($5 million) and a Citation V Ultra ($4 million). He’s about to buy a third, rumored to be a new “Global Express,” considered the ultimate corporate jet, with a price tag around $40 million.

Clayton McWhorter
Source of Wealth: Health Care * $470 Million
Nashville
Clayton McWhorter’s venture capital firm Clayton Associates, which is led by his son Stuart, has had a busy year. Clayton Associates’ portfolio companies Ardent Health Services and Psychiatric Solutions announced plans for Ardent to sell its psychiatric facilities to publicly traded Psychiatric Solutions in a $560 million deal. Meanwhile, Psychiatric Solutions has increased in value since a year ago, from about $25 a share to about $40 a share. Clayton Associates also has money in hot industry sub-sectors, such as nurse recruiting with HCCA International and disease management with Gordian Health Solutions. The firm has more than $100 million to invest in health care and technology companies. McWhorter owns a $2 million home on Tyne Valley Court in Nashville, along with a $1.3 million condo in Naples, Fla.

Bill Sansom
Source of Wealth: Grocery Distribution * $300 Million
Knoxville
Bill Sansom owns and runs Knoxville-based H.T. Hackney Co., which got its start in the late 1800s as a small grocery delivery operation. The wholesale food distribution firm now supplies more than 20,000 grocery and convenience stores. H.T. Hackney also owns Natural Springs Water Group and a furniture-making business. The company generates more than $3.5 billion in annual sales and employs more than 3,600 workers. Sansom has served on the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees and currently serves as a director of Memphis-based First Horizon National Corp. His shares of the financial services company are valued at about $4.4 million. Sansom also serves as a director of Martin Marietta Materials and Astec Industries, and his ownership in the two companies is worth about $1.7 million. Sansom is a former Tennessee commissioner of Transportation and commissioner of Finance and Administration.