30 Fascinating Things About Alice Walton We Bet You Never Knew Before

3 April 2019, 3:21 pm EDT By Ruby Karnick

Alice Walton, the only daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton, instead of working for her father's business like her brothers, is said to have focused on curating art and her personal art collection is now valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Here are some really important facts about the heiress to the fortune of Walmart:

She was the first person to chair the Northwest Arkansas Council and is reported to have played a major role in the development of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport opened in the year 1998.
She is said to have provided $15 million in initial funding for construction, of the $109 million regional airport in their corner of the state.
It was also reported that her company Llama Company underwrote a $79.5 million bond, during the development of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport.
In recognition for her contribution to the creation of the airport, the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport Authority named the terminal the Alice L. Walton Terminal Building.
In the year 2001, Walton was inducted into the Arkansas Aviation Hall of Fame, for her contribution to the construction of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport.
Her father Sam Walton in his 1992 autobiography "Made in America," he remarked that Alice was "the most like me—a maverick—but even more volatile than I am."
Being an avid horse-lover, she is famous for having an eye for determining which 2-month-old horse would grow to become champion cutters.
Walton became the 20th-largest individual contributor to 527 committees in the U.S. presidential election 2004, following her donation of $2.6 million to the conservative Progress for America group.
She is said to have contributed $200,000 to Restore Our Future, the super PAC associated with Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, as of January 2012.
She was 10 years old, when she purchased her first piece of art - a reproduction of Picasso's Blue Nude that she reportedly got from her father's Ben Franklin Dime-Store.

She spearheaded the Walton Family Foundation's involvement in developing Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the heart of Bentonville, Arkansas.
She reportedly purchased art sold from the collection of Daniel Fraad and Rita Fraad at Sotheby's, in New York, in December 2004.
In the year 2005, she is said to have purchased Asher Brown Durand's celebrated painting, Kindred Spirits, in a sealed-bid auction for a whopping $35 million.
In prepararion for the opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, she also purchased works by American painters Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, as well as a notable portrait of George Washington by Charles Willson Peale.
Walton later added Norman Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter" to the Crystal Bridges permanent collections for $4.9 million, in the year 2009.
Alice Louise Walton was born on October 7, 1949 to Sam Walton and Helen Walton, in Newport, Arkansas. She was raised along with her 3 brothers in Bentonville, Arkansas.
She went to Bentonville HS, before graduating with a B.A. in economics and finance from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
She first started her career as an equity analyst and money manager for First Commerce Corporation. Walton reportedly headed investment activities at Arvest Bank Group.
She founded the Llama Company, an investment bank in the year 1988. She was the President, Chairwoman and Chief Executive Officer of the company.
In the year 1998, she closed her company Llama Co., and moved to a ranch in Millsap, Texas, named Walton's Rocking W Ranch. In 2015, she listed the farm for sale and moved to Fort Worth, Texas, to focus on the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Once in an interview, the advisor and board member of Crystal Bridges, John Wilmerding, stated that Walton quietly bought substantial bodies of work by Martin Johnson Heade, Stuart Davis, George Bellows and John Singer Sargent.
In an attempt to quit smoking, he once purchased a painting reminiscent of an earlier painting by John Singer Sargent by Alfred Maurer which depicts a full-length woman smoking.
The said second painting titled "Smoker #9," was by Tom Wesselmann, which depicts a hyper realistic, disembodied hand and mouth smoking a cigarette.
She claims Marsden Hartley as one of her favorite artists and described him as "a very complex guy, somewhat tormented, but a very spiritual person, and love the emotion and the feel and the spirituality of his work."
Talking about another favorite artist of hers - Andrew Wyeth, she said that in his painting "the mystery and loneliness that is expressed. How do you paint loneliness?"
Despite being from a large Republican family, she donated $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee supporting Clinton and other Democrats, in the year 2016.
She first met Clinton, when Clinton was serving as the First Lady of Arkansas and Walton was the only woman sitting on Walmart's board.
She first married at the age of 24 in the year 1974, but was divorced after two and a half years into the marriage. Her husband was a prominent Louisiana investment banker.
Her brother John Thomas Walton, who was an American war veteran, the chairman of True North Partners, a venture capital firm, died on June 27, 2005 in a plane crash.
She has been a victim of multiple automobile incidents, with one in particular being fatal. She lost control of a rented Jeep and plunged into a ravine, shattering her leg during a 1983 Thanksgiving family reunion near Acapulco, Mexico. She had to undergo more than two dozen surgeries, and is still said to suffer from lingering pain.