Bette Nesmith Graham for USD $47.5 million in 1979. At the time, her company employed 200 people and made 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper per year. Bette Nesmith died on May 12, 1980, at the age of 56, in Richardson, Texas. From the start, Graham ran her company with a unique combination of spirituality, egalitarianism, and pragmatism. Raised a Methodist, Graham converted to Christian Science in 1942, and this faith inspired the development of her corporate "Statement of Policy". Part-code of ethics, part-business philosophy, it covered everything from her belief in a "Supreme Being" to a focus on decentralized decision making and
James Nesmith (which was a British colony at the time) while his parents were on a visit from their home in Washington County, Maine, on July 23, 1820. Of Scottish and Irish heritage, his father was William Morrison Nesmith and his mother the former Harriet Miller. About 1828, James and his father moved to Claremont, New Hampshire, where he received a limited education. In 1838, Nesmith moved to Ohio, followed by Iowa in 1842 where he waited to immigrate to Oregon Country. Nesmith planned on traveling the Oregon Trail with Elijah White in 1842, but was late to arrive and instead left