The East Texas oil field is an oil reservoir in Gregg, Rusk, Upshur, Smith and Cherokee counties, described by the Handbook of Texas as the largest and most prolific in the contiguous United States.¹ Oil is trapped in the Woodbine sand of the Cretaceous, and a strong water drive supplied its primary recovery.¹ The field’s discovery in 1930, during the Great Depression, produced a flood of cheap crude that led the Railroad Commission of Texas to limit how much each well could produce.¹²

Discovery

Earlier tests of the Woodbine in East Texas had suggested it was unlikely to produce oil profitably.² In 1927 Columbus Marion Joiner, a promoter from Ardmore, Oklahoma, took leases in Rusk County and sold certificates of interest in syndicates to finance a drilling test.¹ His first two wells on the Daisy Bradford farm were abandoned after a stuck pipe and a twisted drill string.¹ The third, the Bradford No. 3, flowed oil and gas on a drill stem test on September 5, 1930, from a depth of 3,592 feet.¹ Handbook entries differ on its completion date, giving October 3 in the field entry and October 6 in the entry on the industry.¹²

Because the first wells were miles apart, they were at first taken for separate discoveries.¹ Ed Bateman’s Lou Della Crim No. 1, completed in December 1930 about ten miles northwest of the Joiner well, flowed 22,000 barrels a day, and the Lathrop No. 1, completed in January 1931 some twenty five miles north, showed how far the pool reached.¹ The field proved to be about forty three miles long and twelve and a half miles wide.² Independent operators controlled more than three quarters of the productive and prospective acreage.²

Boom

Kilgore, a cotton town of fewer than 500 residents in mid 1930, incorporated in February 1931 and had 12,000 residents by 1936.³ More than 1,100 wells were drilled within its city limits, and part of one downtown block, with the greatest concentration of derricks in the world, came to be called the World’s Richest Acre.³ Operators drilled quickly under the rule of capture, which gave oil to whoever brought it to the surface even if it had migrated from a neighbor’s lease.¹ By mid summer of 1931 about 1,200 wells were producing some 900,000 barrels a day.¹

The glut collapsed prices. Crude sold for ninety nine cents a barrel when the Bradford No. 3 began to produce and for thirteen cents by July 1931.¹ The commission’s first proration order for the field took effect on May 1, 1931, but many operators ignored it, and a federal court struck it down in July.¹

Regulation

On August 17, 1931, Governor Ross S. Sterling declared martial law and sent the Texas National Guard and Texas Rangers to shut in all 1,644 wells in the field.¹ Production resumed in September under a new allowable, but oil produced above the legal limit, known as hot oil, left the field by truck, rail and pipeline.¹⁴ A federal court ended martial law in February 1932, and a special session of the legislature that November authorized proration based on market demand.¹

Federal help followed. Congress passed the Connally Hot Oil Act on February 22, 1935, and an interstate compact among the oil states, drawn in Dallas that same month, strengthened enforcement.¹⁴ By 1938 operators had begun reinjecting produced salt water to maintain reservoir pressure, a practice credited with the field’s unusually high recovery.¹ Major refiners processed half of its oil by 1937, and major companies gradually bought out most of the independents; the pace and consequences of that kind of combination are the subject of an essay on consolidation.²³

Later history

During the Second World War the field was the starting point of the Big Inch, a twenty four inch pipeline laid more than 1,400 miles to carry East Texas crude to refineries in the East.¹ From the late 1940s into the 1960s investigators found 380 wells that had been deliberately slanted from outside the field into productive leases.¹ By January 1, 1993, the field had produced 5,145,562,000 barrels of oil from some 30,340 wells drilled across about 140,000 acres.¹ Kilgore, near its center, became a hub of production, processing, service and supply,³ the kind of work described in the entry on oilfield services.

Dallas connections

Two Dallas firms, the East Texas Refining Company and the Central Refining Company, were among the largest processors of the field’s crude in 1931, and by 1937 the Texas Company operated the largest plants processing it, at Neches and in West Dallas.² In Dallas banking, Fred F. Florence of the Republic National Bank, who had begun his career at a bank in Rusk, took a lead in financing commodities, especially cotton and oil reserves, and made his bank one of the first in Texas to lend against oil reserves.⁵ Lending on cotton, the other commodity in that pairing, is traced in the history of Dallas cotton banks and the reserve bank.

The discovery came almost thirty years after the Lucas gusher at Spindletop in 1901, and East Texas was the last region of the state to reach high volume oil production.⁶² Other entries are listed in the reference index.

References

Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas, East Texas Oilfield ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹
Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas, Oil and Gas Industry ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas, Kilgore, TX ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas, Hot Oil ↩ ↩²
Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas, Florence, Fred Farrel ↩
Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas, Spindletop Oilfield ↩