Historic Midland

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Built in 1927 by Dr. John B. Thomas,
the Thomas Building featured a 25
bed hospital on its top floor and a
pharmacy and drug store on the
bottom floor.
leasing mineral rights to land and drilling for oil
in selected West Texas counties.” Those
involved in the association hoped to find oil in
Mitchell County or the immediate area. At about
the same time, another group interested in seeking
oil was organized, this one called the
Travelers Oil Company. It was Travelers and
Underwriters, the T and P well designated
Underwriters No. 1, that would usher in the era
of oil production in the Permian Basin.
“On February 6, 1920, the Colorado Record
announced that the Underwriters Producing
and Refining Company would be ready to spud
in its first well on the Morrison block within a
few days, and that the first carload of machinery
had arrived for the Travelers Oil and
Development Company, a standard rig that
would be set up presently on the Landers ranch.
A campaign to explore the petroleum resources
of Mitchell County had at last begun in earnest,”
wrote Samuel D. Myres in The Permian Basin.
Steve Owen, general field manager for
Underwriters, went out to the well on June
18th, talked to drillers for several hours, and
then returned to Colorado “with several small
bottles of oil from the well. The sight of the oil
quickened the curiosity and enthusiasm of the
viewers, who were many,” wrote Myres.
In the June 25, 1920 edition of the Colorado
newspaper was this assessment of the discovery
in Mitchell County:
“The opening up of this well will mean hundreds
of new drilling contracts for Mitchell
County—in fact, rumors of a number of trades
are thick and in 30 days Mitchell will be dotted
with oil derricks and the sound of the drill will
be heard throughout the land. The daily papers
all over the United States will today carry the
announcement of this discovery and in less than
30 days Colorado expects to have a population
of ten to twenty thousand. The excitement is
running high with local people, and lease
hounds are arriving on every train. While the
prices on leases are steadily climbing, they are
not considered high compared to the outlook
and prospects for a rich field.”
Colorado grew as a result of the oil discovery,
but not immediately. Yet this well was important,
though it would be eclipsed within three
years by another oil “find” at Big Lake. Wrote
Myres in The Permian Basin, “Yet, the discovery
was significant, for it was the first of consequence
in the Permian Basin. Especially important,
it was a signal for further exploration and
led to the development of one of the great oil
provinces of the world.”
However, it was Carl Cromwell, the man they
called “The Big Swede,” who got the big attention.
Cromwell brought in the Santa Rita No. 1
on May 28, 1923, on University of Texas land
west of the Reagan County community of Big
Lake. The “plume of black smoke rising above
the derrick” that day changed the course of West
Texas forever and turned cowtowns like San
Angelo, Midland, Odessa and Big Spring into
adversaries vying for the title of the “Oil Capital
of West Texas.”
An article in The Kansas City Star on February
3, 1929, proclaiming the discovery of oil in
Reagan County “brought geologists and oil scouts
from everywhere to prospect all over Southwest
Texas and other fields were opened in due time.
New oil towns sprang up in the sage brush and
mesquite of the prairie and in a few months
would have populations of 5,000 to 10,000. San
Angelo tripled its population and became the oil
metropolis of all that new oil country. Big hotels
and business blocks, theaters and office buildings
went up and newly-made oil millionaires went
there to build homes and to live. The Kansas City,
Mexico & Orient railway, which was fast becoming
just ‘two streaks of rust’ and was threatened
with abandonment, was born again by the opening
of the new oil field. It had to borrow rolling
stock to haul in oil machinery and material and
to haul out oil; its long freight trains trailed across
the sands; Pullman cars were put on to haul the
Argonauts of the new oil fields, and the Santa Fe
railroad thought it would be a good investment to
buy and operate the Orient and it paid 15 million
dollars for it.”
Texon Oil & Land Co. and Carl Cromwell
had given West Texas a new burst of life, but
while San Angelo reaped the benefits of that first
oil discovery, it was not to last as the oil capital.
Wrote a newspaperman, “Nobody knew then
that Santa Rita No. 1 would open the vast
Permian Basin oil reservoir south of Mitchell
County, where the first producer had been
drilled. Oil men were skeptical, adopting a “wait
and see” attitude. There had been many prior
reports of promising discoveries in West Texas
46 ✦ HISTORIC MIDLAND