Wolf Brand Chili Statue

The Wolf Brand Chili statue in downtown Corsicana is a bronze wolf sitting on top of a can of Wolf Brand Chili, on Beaton Street outside the Across the Street Diner, where Lyman T. Davis sold chili from a wagon in front of the Blue Front Saloon in 1895. The sculptor, Nancy Rebal, unveiled it in October 2018, and five-cent cups of chili, the price Davis had charged a bowl, were sold at the ceremony with the takings given to the Navarro County Food Pantry. The wolf is Kaiser Bill, Davis's pet. At the unveiling Rebal told the crowd that anyone who rubs the wolf's paw is almost certain to have good luck, and she told the mayor, Don Denbow, to rub it. Davis later sold his chili in brick form from a Corsicana meat market as Lyman's Famous Home Made Chili.

He began canning it in 1921 and around then named the brand after Kaiser Bill. When oil was found on his farm in 1924 he sold the business to two Corsicana men, J. C. West and Fred Slauson, whose salesmen drove Model T trucks with cabs shaped and painted like the can and, by the Handbook of Texas account, a live wolf caged in the back; the Corsicana Daily Sun says it was sometimes a coyote. Quaker Oats bought the company in 1957 and closed the Corsicana plant in 1985, and the brand now belongs to Conagra. The statue is one of a series of bronzes on the city's downtown walking tour, which began with an oil field worker at Sixth Avenue and Beaton Street.