Seattle to New Mexico (and on to Texas): Mar 26 - East Texas Oil Museum

Saturday had us visiting Kilgore, Texas - home of the East Texas Oil Boom and the Kilgore Rangerettes. We stopped off at a great little museum on the Kilgore College called the East Texas Oil Museum. It highlights the discovery of oil in East Texas in 1930-31 and the subsequent 'boom' that transformed Kilgore from a 'town' of less that 500 people, mostly farmers, to a city of 8000 in just a couple of days. I should add that there is also a museum dedicated to the Rangerettes but we didn't go to that one.

The information below is taken from the Oil Museum's brochure:

A 70-year old wildcatter named Columbus Marion Joiner, had drilled two dry wells when in 1929 he spudded (drilled in an unproven area) a third hole on a Rusk County farm owned by Daisy Bradford. In Oct 1930 the production test resulted in a gusher. Another well test by the Bateman Oil Company on the Lou Della Crim farm resulted in a gusher on December 28, 1930, producing 22,000 barrels of oil a day. The two wells were only 9-miles apart and while at the beginning no one realized there was any connection between them - later it was discovered that East Texas sits on top of an incredible deposit of oil in the Woodbine formation.

The initial 'boom' was completed on Jan 26, 1931 the JK Lathrop well in Gregg County came in at 3,587' producing 18,000 barrels a day. Drilling rapidly increased from 7 wells every two weeks to 7 wells a day to 100+ wells a day! The initial barrels of oil sold for $1.10/brl but quickly dropped to 15 cents due to marketing flooding. The East Texas Oil Boom was instrumental in creating legislative actions: a market demand law, confiscation law, truck tender law, the refinery control & felony bill and the Connolly Hot Oil Act of 1935.

The East Texas Oil Field had produced 6 billion barrels of oil, some of which gave the Allies the petroleum reserve stability needed to win WWII. There are 17,000 wells still active in the area.

Now, a little bit about museum - it has several pieces of oil equipment from 'back in the day'. The highlight of the museum (to me) was the recreated downtown East Texas town street. There were the re-created store fronts of the shops you'd see during that period and in the middle was the muddy street, clogged with cars and wagons.

In the movie theater, they show a short (10-15 min) film about the boom, showing actual footage from the boom. The weather at this time was horrendous with unprecedented rain - and if you know East Texas you know what a bog it can be. I can't imagine working in all that mud & muck. Unlike today, pretty much anyone that had the gumption and access to the know-how could drill a well - there weren't the fancy, organized companies that you see today. Can you imagine, grabbing a bunch of friends or your family and drilling an oil well?

During this time there were, of course, the shady characters. Lost of thieving going on - the film showed how people could tap into someone else's pipe line. They even had left-handed handles (there was a different name but I can't think of it now) that looked like they were turned off when actually they were turned on and bleeding someone's line.

Read more about the Museum here.