William Wright (W. W.) Heard (April 28, 1853 - May 31, 1926) was the 32nd Governor of Louisiana from 1900 to 1904. His governorship saw the start of the Louisiana's oil and gas industry. Early life Heard was educated in a local school in his native Union Parish. He long remembered the challenges of educating children in rural areas. Heard worked to create the first Louisiana State Board of Education. On December 3, 1878, Heard married the former Isbella E. Manning. The couple had seventeen children, including Louisiana Belle, Manning, William Wright Heard, Jr., and Alma, who died as a toddler. Public service In 1884, Heard was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives from Union Parish in north Louisiana, based about Farmerville. After a single four-year term, he was elected in 1888 to the Louisiana State Senate for a four-year term. In 1892, Heard was elected as Louisiana state auditor, a position that he held for two terms of eight years. The auditor's position is no longer elected. As a protégé of the outgoing governor, Murphy James Foster, Sr., Heard was controversially hand-picked by Foster to succeed him at the Democratic state convention of 1900 at a time before Louisiana held primary elections. Heard was a member of the Democratic Party, but he had Populist tendencies and was a supporter of the expanded coinage of silver. At the general election, he defeated two Republicans running on separate tickets, both of whom received less than 22 percent of the vote following the mass-scale disenfranchisement of African American voters via Jim Crow laws. Reflecting this was the dramatic decline in voting, from a post-Reconstruction high in the 1896 statewide election of over 203,000 votes down to only 76,000 by 1900. Not until 1940 would more than 200,000 voters participate in a general election for governor. This 1900 election also marked the last time Republicans would have any real presence in the legislature until the 1960s. Heard was inaugurated governor on May 8, 1900, and held this office until May 10, 1904. At the time governors in Louisiana could not succeed themselves. His term was fairly low-key compared to other colorful and dynamic personalities that held that office and he was considered to be a "bureaucratic" governor. His lieutenant governor was Albert Estopinal, a planter and outgoing state senator from St. Bernard Parish. As state banking commissioner, Heard named Lee Emmett Thomas,