Historic Photos of Texas Oil

Mike Cox

Description

On January 10, 1901, near Beaumont, Texas, an unremarkable knoll of earth the world would soon call Spindletop shot a geyser of oil a hundred feet into the air, confirming the belief of Pattillo Higgins that black gold lay buried there. The Texas oil industry had begun in earnest, and neither Texas nor the world would ever be the same.

In the years to come, Texas oil would fuel the nation’s automobiles and help to bring victory to the Allies in both world wars, shaping America’s destiny throughout the twentieth century.

Join author and historian Mike Cox in this photographic visit to the heyday of Texas crude as he recounts the stories of key oil-patch discoveries around the state. Nearly 200 images in vivid black-and-white, with captions and introductions, offer a roughneck-close look at this uniquely American tale of dry holes and gushers, ragtowns and riches, boomtowns, blowouts, and wildcatters gone broke.

Sujets

• Loisirs
• Collections photographiques
• Techniques
• Energie et Environnement
• Energie & environnement
• Texas
• Local
• History
• West
• United States
• State
• Mike Cox
• History of Texas
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 août 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781618584311
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

HISTORIC PHOTOS OF
TEXAS OIL
T EXT AND C APTIONS BY M IKE C OX
Panorama of the Ranger oil field photographed May 14, 1919.
HISTORIC PHOTOS OF
TEXAS OIL
Turner Publishing Company
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Historic Photos of Texas Oil
Copyright 2009 Turner Publishing Company
All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009921194
ISBN-13: 978-1-59652-531-3
Printed in China
09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16-0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C ONTENTS
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
P REFACE
E ARLY O IL (1880-1910)
N ORTH T EXAS (1911-1921)
W EST T EXAS (1926-1940 S )
E AST T EXAS (1915-1960 S )
N OTES ON THE I MAGES
The J. S. Cullinan and Company refinery, which began distilling crude oil in 1898. Corsicana city fathers had lured Cullinan to Texas from the Pennsylvania oil field. His company, capitalized at $100,000, built tanks, pipelines, and the refinery.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume, Historic Photos of Texas Oil , is the result of the cooperation and efforts of many individuals, organizations, and corporations. It is with great thanks that we acknowledge the valuable contribution of the following for their generous support:
Mike Cox Collection
Texas Department of Transportation
East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin University
Texas Energy Museum
Nita Stewart Haley Memorial Library
Texas Oil and Gas Association
Library of Congress
Texas State Archives
Mexia Chamber of Commerce George Olson, San Antonio, Texas
Larry Turner, Citizens National Bank, Corsicana, Texas
Norman Porter, Pearsall, Texas
West Texas Collection, Angelo State University, San Angelo, Texas

Kenneth Wilson, Dripping Springs, Texas
-------
With the exception of touching up imperfections that have accrued with the passage of time and cropping where necessary, no changes have been made. The focus and clarity of many images is limited by the technology and the ability of the photographer at the time they were taken.
P REFACE
In July 1919, a young newspaperman from Fort Worth stuck a red two-cent stamp upside down on a foldout postcard containing 26 images of the wild and woolly boom town of Ranger and mailed it to his wife. The Future Oil Metropolis of Texas, the smiling Mr. Sun on the card s cover proclaimed. Business Opportunities? Yes! Work? Plenty!
Indeed, the light of prosperity shined brightly on Texas that distant summer. The McCleskey Number 1 had blown in near Ranger 21 months earlier, triggering a boom that made news all over the world. Not only that, Texas oil had just helped the United States and her allies defeat Germany in the First World War.
The journalist who rented a hotel room in Eastland County to serve as his home away from home while covering the oil boom was my late grandfather, L. A. Wilke. I still have that souvenir he bought for a quarter to send to my grandmother, who was staying with her mother in San Angelo for as long as my granddad had to be in the oil patch. I m sure it never occurred to my grandparents that 90 years later, I would be using some of the postcard s public domain images.
Just as my maternal grandfather had gone to the oil fields as a reporter, my other grandfather, Luther McNeil, came to the Panhandle boom town of Borger in 1926 to hire on as a roughneck. Back on the Wilke side of my family, Granddad s uncle, Marshall L. Johnson, an old buffalo hunter turned cowboy turned printer, had spent some time in the southeast Texas oil field in 1901 hoping to cash in on the nascent petroleum industry. But my oil field heritage is not unique. Hundreds of thousands of people made money off Texas oil during the boom years. Or tried to.
The story of Texas from its first settlement through the twentieth century can be boiled down to three words: Cotton, cattle, and oil. But it was the discovery of huge quantities of oil in the Spindletop field near Beaumont in 1901 that not only transformed Texas, it changed the world. Though the oil industry is still a big part of what makes Texas, the first half of the twentieth century was oil s golden era-a rollicking time of fortunes made and fortunes lost, of gushers and dry holes, boom towns and ghost towns. Oil spawned Texas industrial development, revolutionized transportation, led to the urbanization of the state, helped birth the conservative movement, and made the University of Texas one of the richest institutions of higher learning in the world. Oil also made rich many men and women who eventually saw fit to reinvest in their state by donating some of their fortunes for college buildings, hospitals, libraries, art museums, and assorted other philanthropies.
Beyond all that, the oil industry shaped the world s perception of Texas. The wheeler-dealer type became a Texas icon, right up there with the cowboy. From the 1940 Clark Cable movie Boom Town to J. R. Ewing in the TV series Dallas, Texas oil fueled popular culture as well as the nation s furnaces, trains, ships, motor vehicles, and airplanes. Oh, and as the character played by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate was famously reminded, let us not forget plastics.
Just as its title suggests, Historic Photos of Texas Oil chronicles this colorful era photographically with nearly 200 vintage images. What made this possible is that unlike earlier important periods in Texas history, photography had become fairly well advanced by the early 1900s, when oil literally exploded as a major industry. Commercial photographers and the government took a lot of quality images at Spindletop, and the number of images taken in the oil patch grew along with the scope of the industry in Texas.
This book contains an assortment of images from all those sources and more: Government photos, scenes from stereograph cards, real photo postcards produced by itinerant photographers, news photographs, and snapshots by nameless amateurs. Their quality varies, but they all tell a story.
Contrary to the hype in that souvenir postcard my granddad mailed to my grandmother from the oil patch, and which she kept in the top drawer of her dresser until she passed it on to me, booming Ranger did not grow into a great oil metropolis. But S. M. Sager, who published that long-ago postcard and clearly understood that contemporary images eventually become historically valuable, offered one piece of advice that still makes sense today: Keep these views in your files or your library.
- Mike Cox
A long line of tank cars laden with Spindletop oil. In 1901, 1,750,000 barrels of oil shipped from Beaumont. Texas oil soon began to replace coal in railroad locomotives, sent ships across the oceans, warmed homes, and generated power in cities across the nation as well as in Europe and South America.
E ARLY O IL
(1880-1910)
In the summer of 1543, Spanish explorer Luis de Moscoso Alvarado, shipwrecked on the Texas coast somewhere between present High Island and Sabine Pass, saw oil floating on water. He and his companions used it to caulk the boats they built, a fact he duly noted in his later account of the adventure. As Texas began to be settled, new arrivals noted oil seeps here and there (oil or asphalt had been documented in 18 counties by 1874), but since oil had no real economic value, no one cared.
The first deliberate drilling for oil in Texas came in 1866 near Melrose in Nacogdoches County. Lyne Taliaferro Barret hit oil at 110 feet. The well produced ten barrels a day. A year later, Peyton F. Edwards and Amory Reily Starr drilled a well at a nearby Oil Springs. Several other wells came in, but slight demand kept development slow-paced. In 1894, a crew drilling for water hit oil near Corsicana in Navarro County. The Corsicana discovery killed off any further interest in Nacogdoches oil patch, where production had dwindled to a barrel a day per well. By 1897, the Corsicana field had 287 wells. Four years later, the first refinery in Texas went up there.
But what happened near Beaumont in the winter of 1901 changed everything. For years, Pattillo Higgins had believed oil could be found under a Jefferson County salt dome known as the Big Hill. Three test wells had failed, but Higgins still believed. In 1899, he and his investors persuaded mining engineer Anthony F. Lucas, then living in Washington, D.C., to drill a well on the hill. Drilling began on October 27, 1900, and continued through early winter. Then, at 10:30 A.M. on Thursday, January 10, 1901, a column of dark-green oil shot from the well, spouting twice as high as the wooden derrick. It took Lucas crew nine days to cap the well, which produced an incredible 75,000 barrels a day.
The discovery brought a tidal wave of money-hungry humanity to the upper Texas coast, the 1849 California gold rush all over again. But this time the gold was viscous and black. The Texas oil industry had begun in earnest, and neither Texas nor the world would ever be the same.

Photography had not yet become common in Texas in 1866 when Virginia-born Lyne Taliaferro Barret drilled the state s first commercial oil well in Nacogdoches County, and there is no known image of it. But 14 years later someone took this photograph of twin 1,000-gallon wooden oil tanks built by Barret s Melrose Petroleum Company. Not only are these Texas first storage tanks, the Nacogdoches field was the first in the South.

By 1937, all that remained of the first producing oil well in Texas was this tree-surrounded wellhead. On September 12, 1866, only one year after the end of the Civil War, a drilling crew using a tripod rig hit oil at 106 feet twelve miles east of Nacogdoches. The well flowed at the rate of ten barrels a day. Barret managed to attract one investor, but when the nex