Local History
Texas Oil Field Town Historical Markers: The Boomtowns That Rose and Sometimes Fell
Ranger, Burkburnett, Mexia, Wortham and Texon each got rich on oil, and some never recovered when it left. Five Texas historical markers tell you exactly where to stand.
Photo: Delfino Barboza / Unsplash. Midland, Texas.
You're driving through Ranger, Texas, and the main street looks too wide for the traffic on it. Storefronts sit empty. The town feels like it was built for ten times the people who live there now, because it was. Texas has more than 16,000 official historical markers, and the ones in oil country carry the strangest stories on the map. RoadHistorical is a Texas historical preservation platform that tells you when you're about to pass one. This article covers five markers in old oil towns, from the gushers that made them to the years the money left.
Ranger: The Well That Fed a War
On July 2, 1917, a contractor named Warren Wagner started drilling on J.H. McCleskey's farm. The Texas and Pacific Coal Company had already hit oil at 1,000 feet two years earlier, about ten miles east of town. Then the follow-up wells came up dry, and hope died down. Local leaders drove to Thurber to find the company's general manager, William Knox Gordon. Gordon thought the geologists were wrong. He believed the oil sat much deeper.
He agreed to drill to 3,500 feet. On October 17, 1917, at 3,432 feet, McCleskey Well No. 1 roared in at an estimated 1,600 barrels a day. The marker says Ranger’s oil wiped out critical wartime shortages. It credits the town with letting the Allies "float to victory on a wave of oil." Crews plugged the well in May 1920.
Find the discovery well marker at 1313 S. Commerce Street, Ranger, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
A second marker, Roaring Ranger, describes what the boom did to daily life. Ten trains a day brought prospectors packed into the aisles. A town of roughly a dozen houses turned into a city of drillers and oil company offices. Men rented beds in shifts. When the beds ran out, they paid to sleep in overstuffed chairs. For two rainy years the streets ran to mud. A sled ferried people across. A man in hip boots carried them piggyback. After five murders in a single day, officers arrested a wave of criminals and ran the gamblers out.
You can read that one at its roadside spot north of the discovery well.
Burkburnett: The Town That Became a Movie
The name came from a hunting trip. President Theodore Roosevelt asked that the post office be named for rancher Burk Burnett after their 1905 wolf hunt in the area. Joseph A. Kemp and Frank Kell laid out the townsite in 1907. Oil showed up in 1912 with the Chris Schmoker No. 1, but the town stayed small.
That ended on July 29, 1918. A 2,200-barrel gusher came in on S. L. Fowler's farm, about a mile from where the marker stands today. Drillers completed 200 wells inside the townsite within three months. The marker calls it a forest of derricks. Population went from 1,500 to 15,000 in a year. One local bank started with $25,000 in capital and pulled $10,000 a month from a single well behind the building.
Hollywood noticed. A 1941 movie made Burkburnett famous worldwide, adapted from a story called "Lady comes to Burkburnett." Unlike Ranger, this town kept going. Oil and agriculture still carry the local economy.
The marker sits just outside Burkburnett, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Mexia and Wortham: Two Booms, Nine Miles Apart
Central Texas got its turn in the 1920s, and it happened fast. The Mexia Oil Boom marker records a population jump from 4,000 to 50,000 within days of the 1920 discovery at the Rogers No. 1 well, 1.6 miles west of the marker off FM 1633. The wildcatter behind it, A. E. Humphreys, hit oil at 3,105 feet and put 2,000 men to work. In the first boom year, $5 million went into construction. Crews built storage tanks for more than 30 million barrels, and it still wasn't enough for what the field produced.
The crowd brought trouble with it. The marker notes that undesirables poured in too. The Texas Rangers ran them out by the thousands in a single day. This was oil before the state enforced proration, so operators pumped as hard as they could.
Nine miles north, Wortham got a shorter and sharper version. The Wortham Oil Boom marker tells you the town once rejected a well because it produced gas instead of water. That was 1912. On November 27, 1924, the Roy Simmons No. 1 came in as a gusher a mile south of the marker. Over 300 drilling rigs crowded the field within three weeks. January 1925 alone produced 3,509,768 barrels. By September 1927, wasteful drilling had dropped the field to 3,000 barrels a day, and the boom was over. Three years, start to finish.
Mexia's marker is on SH 14 at the south side of town. Wortham's is here. Find them in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Texon: The Company Town With an Expiration Date
Some boomtowns died slowly. This one got closed on purpose.
The state gave the land around the marker to the University of Texas in 1876. UT leased it to cattlemen. Frank Pickrell and Haymon Krupp of the Texon Oil and Land Company decided to drill it anyway. Their driller, Carl Cromwell, brought in Santa Rita No. 1 on May 28, 1923. It was the first gusher in the Permian Basin, and the royalties from that land still fund the state’s university endowment.
Big Lake Oil Company founded Texon in 1924 as the first company town in the Permian Basin. Company president Levi Smith planned it himself. The town had stores, a school, a doctor, a dentist, a hospital, a theater, a park, and a baseball team people traveled to watch. The post office opened in 1926. As many as 2,000 people lived there.
Then the corporate chain moved. Plymouth Oil absorbed Big Lake Oil, then sold to Marathon Oil. The company closed the town in 1962. A company builds your town, and a company can close it.
The Texon marker stands at US 67 and FM 1675 near Big Lake, TX. Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Why These Towns Boomed at All
Everything above traces back to January 10, 1901, when a gusher came in at Spindletop near Beaumont. Texas oil production went from 836,039 barrels in 1900 to 4,393,658 barrels in 1901. Beaumont grew from 10,000 people to 50,000. More than 600 oil companies formed in the rush. Most of them vanished. A few became Texaco, Gulf, Mobil, and Sun Oil.
Ranger, Burkburnett, Mexia, Wortham, and Texon were all running the same play. Drill, draw a crowd, build fast, and find out later whether the field could hold up.
How RoadHistorical Finds These Markers
Most of these markers sit on state highways and farm roads with nowhere obvious to pull over. Discovery Mode solves that. The app watches your route and tells you when a marker is coming up, so you get a heads-up instead of a rearview glimpse. Stopping at a marker is how these stories stay alive. That's preservation, and it takes about four minutes.
The AI Tour Guide answers what the plaque leaves out. Ask why Wortham's field collapsed. Ask what happened to Texon's residents after 1962. You get an answer you can follow up on, not a wall of text. Offline mode matters out here too. The drive to Texon in Reagan County runs long stretches with no cell coverage, and the app keeps working anyway.
Start Discovering Texas History Today
RoadHistorical is free to download on iPhone and Android. Download it here and turn on Discovery Mode before your next drive. Android users can download RoadHistorical from Google Play.
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