Historic Tulsa

✧
Right: In 1927, the International Petroleum
Exposition established its permanent home
at the Tulsa fairgrounds. The Golden Driller,
at right, marked the entrance where
thousands of spectators were on hand for the
annual oil and gas industry show in 1966.
COURTESY OF THE OKLAHOMA PUBLISHING COMPANY.
Below: Many football players from Kendall
College, now the University of Tulsa, were
members of the Tulsa Ambulance Company
that fought in Europe in World War I. In
this photograph, the company poses in
Neuenahr, Germany, in January 1919, as
part of the Army of Occupation.
HISTORIC TULSA
34
Nature also dealt Tulsa a body blow in the
1920s. In June, 1923, the Arkansas River left
its banks. Flood waters left four thousand
Tulsans homeless—refineries and businesses
were flooded. All roads into the city
except from the north were closed. Anyone
traveling from Tulsa to Sand Springs had to do
so by boat.
Local leaders began the International
Petroleum Exposition (IPE), a gathering of the
exclusive worldwide fraternity of oil and gas
explorers and developers that same year. The
IPE was the premier annual event in the
petroleum industry and was billed as the
largest gathering of international oil men
in the world. The exposition offered oilrelated
businesses the opportunity to tout
their products to the leading companies in
the industry.
By 1927, Tulsa was home to fifteen
hundred oil-related companies whose
operations in the mid-continent fields
produced two-thirds of the nation’s oil. Tulsa
had no resemblance to Tulsee Town.
Even though the 1920s was a time of
natural and human disaster, it was a decade of
extraordinary prosperity in Tulsa County.
Even after the stock market crash in 1929,
signaling the onset of the greatest and deepest
economic downturn in modern history, Tulsa
was insulated—at least for awhile. The oil
industry was one of the last to be affected by
the Great Depression.
While the economy was still strong,
cultural development continued in Tulsa. The
opera house, that had been completed in
1906 even before the construction of sewers,
paved streets, and sidewalks, signaled Tulsa’s
appreciation for the arts.
The Great Depression wove its destructive
forces throughout the land, By the winter of
1931, soup lines were commonplace in Tulsa
as banks closed, factories shut their doors, and