BLUM, LEON (1837-1906). Leon Blum, businessman and philanthropist, son of Isaac and Julie Blum, was born in Gunderschoffer, Alsace, in 1837. He served an apprenticeship with a tinsmith before he immigrated to the United States in 1854. He first opened a mercantile business in Richmond, Texas, but moved his business to Galveston in 1869 and soon enlarged his operations to reach throughout Texas and the Southwest and into foreign countries. Blum was said to be the largest Texas importer of dry goods at the time, as well as an exporter of cotton and other commodities. His firm, Leon and H. Blum, was one of the stockholders in the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway, and the town of Blum, in Hill County, was named for him when the townsite was developed on the line. In 1903 he was president of Blum Land Company. He was a contributor to Bayland Orphans' Home for Boys and to various schools. Blum married Henrietta Levy of Corpus Christi in 1862; they had two children. He died at Galveston on April 28, 1906, and was buried there in the Hebrew Cemetery.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: John Henry Brown, Indian Wars and Pioneers of Texas (Austin: Daniell, 1880; reprod., Easley, South Carolina: Southern Historical Press, 1978). Lewis E. Daniell, Types of Successful Men in Texas (Austin: Von Boeckmann, 1890). Galveston News, April 28, 1906.
