In the early 1890s, Texas developer Patillo Higgins was convinced that Sour Spring Mound, a hill south of Beaumont, was an anticline — an arch-like fold of stratified rock filled with oil just below the earth’s surface. Everybody from oil experts to geologists told Higgins he was wrong. The three test wells he drilled between 1893 and 1896 would have confirmed this, but his drill didn’t get through the heaving sands 400 feet below the earth’s surface.
Higgins’ delusion captured the attention of salt engineer Anthony Francis Lucas. He suspected Higgins was right about the hill for the wrong reasons. His experiences working in Lousiana led Lucas to believe that the hill, soon to be known as Spindletop, was an underground salt dome trapping massive amounts of oil around its edges.
In Episode 7 of The Engines of Texanity, we talk about how Spindletop marked the beginning of the Texas oil boom and a new era of civilization.
After drilling his own failed well in 1899, Lucas hired three brothers — Jim, Al and Curt Hamill. Jim was a small farmer from Waco who drilled water wells to support himself. He turned to drilling oil wells during the first little Texas oil boom in 1894. Eventually Jim and his brothers went out on their own as drilling contractors, distinguishing themselves for their honesty, work ethic and practical genius.
On Oct. 27, 1900, the Hamill brothers and Lucas began drilling anew at Spindletop, but soon they reached the heaving sands, and later other obstacles, that derailed previous drilling attempts. The Hamills’ expertise, ingenuity and fortitude led them to find alternative drilling techniques. They broke through the sands, measuring progress an inch at a time.
On the morning of Jan. 10, 1901, after months of struggles and slow progress, drilling reached a depth of 1,020 feet and couldn’t go any further. The entire assembly, then the rig itself, began to shake. Mud came belching out of the hole. Bystanders heard hissing and spewing followed by an audible rumble beneath the earth that grew into a roar.
Mud shot out of the ground like a geyser, launching rocks and drill pipe hundreds of feet into the air. The drillers ran for cover. Minutes later, a column of oil shot out like a cannon, up through the rig floor and the splintered derrick, 150 feet into the air. Spindletop would rage for nine days, producing around 100,000 barrels of oil per day.
By the end of 1901, there were 138 prolific oil wells in the area, with 46 more rigs actively drilling, at a density of about 20 wells per acre. Throughout that year, coal-burning furnaces, trains and steamships across the country switched to oil for fuel and the oil-dependent four-stroke internal combustion engine became an innovation in transportation.
Oil was radically much more energy dense than anything that came before it. Cities could get their energy needs from areas 1/1000th of their size, even as energy use increased. Massive numbers of people concentrated into metropolises like never before in human history. In the 1870s, 95% of Texans lived on farms; by 1933, that number was down to 33%; by 1955, it was less than 10%. Oil towns like Dallas and Houston passed farm and ranch centers like San Antonio as the largest cities in the state.
Oil yielded runaway profit margins that hadn’t been seen since the first years of cotton cultivation. Texas started to accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars in capital. Of course, this new wealth tended to follow the patterns of old wealth: it was the great farming, ranching and lumber barons who became the first great oil barons.
In historical terms, Texas became an industrial powerhouse overnight. The great fortunes made in oil also confirmed Texans’ deeply held notions that true wealth only comes from land. Texas is already the largest producer of wind power in the U.S. and, by the end of 2023, the largest producer of solar power as well. Those industries — as much as oil and lumber and cattle and cotton — are natural outgrowths of Texans’ drive to maximize the output of every square inch of land at their disposal.
