Our Origin

Claude B. “Doc” Pennington was born in Chunky, Mississippi, in 1900, and Lydia Irene Wells was born in Bayou Sara, Louisiana, in 1899. Doc and Irene first met on Third Street in Baton Rouge and married in 1921. Their only child, Claude B. “Onion” Pennington Jr., died in an oil field accident in 1957. He was Paula Pennington de la Bretonne’s father.

Doc and Irene’s story actually began much earlier than this. Doc’s father was a physician who often took his young son along as he traveled by horse and buggy to make house calls. Although Doc’s father encouraged him to become an optometrist, he initially chose to work in the oil fields as a roughneck. In the early 1920s, Doc started his career as a laborer in the Louisiana oil and gas industry but soon decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue a practice in optometry.

It wasn’t until the 1950s, after his father passed away, that Pennington returned to his original passion, the oil field. He discovered Mount Pleasant Plantation, which was located on 2,000 acres on the Mississippi River bank in northern East Baton Rouge Parish. He was immediately intrigued. Pennington promptly borrowed $300 for a new suit and traveled to Chicago to meet the landowner in hopes of leasing the mineral rights to the property.

In May of 1957, Pennington and his only child, C. B. Pennington Jr., purchased Mount Pleasant Plantation for $400,000, which later proved to be the most important investment of his life and ultimately made Doc and Irene’s philanthropy possible.

In 1975, while drilling a well near False River, Chevron discovered a rich mineral layer three miles underground, and Mount Pleasant sat right above an untapped stretch of oil that spanned through South Louisiana. Chevron declined Pennington’s request to drill on his land, but Amoco saw promise in Pennington’s prospect and drilled a well north of the plantation in 1977. The well struck one of the largest oil and gas finds in Louisiana history!

Pennington and his wife, Irene, committed to sharing their success with the community that had been such an important part of their lives. In 1980, the couple gave a $125 million gift to Louisiana State University to create a nutrition research facility. The Pennington Biomedical Research Center is now a renowned institution that conducts groundbreaking research in obesity, nutrition, and health and performance enhancement.