Water Rails & Oil - Historic Mid & South Jefferson County

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Oil was discovered in Spindletop Field
in northern Jefferson County in 1901
and was piped overland to refineries
in Port Arthur. The handwriting on
the photo reads: “Dear ‘Gov,’ This is
one of the early day electric rigs that
had the grits to give us troubles.
Remember you always said ‘Rig down
Hot-Grits.’ This was at Spindletop.
2nd boom, 1928. Best Wishes to you,
C. R. ‘Slim’ Bayless.”
COURTESY OF THE PORT ARTHUR PUBLIC LIBRARY,
HISTORICAL COLLECTION.
visited the southern part of Jefferson County,
other Texans had prospected for “black gold,” or
oil. Edwin Drake drilled the first American oil
well in 1859, and Lynn Taliaferro Barret
completed the first well in Texas in
Nacogdoches County in 1866. Joseph Cullinan
and others brought in wells in Navarro and
other counties in Texas in the 1880s. For a
decade or more, Patillo Higgins predicted that
oil awaited under a slight rise—a salt dome,
really—located a few miles south of the business
district of Beaumont and fifteen or so miles
north of Port Arthur. Higgins named the area
Gladys Hill after a young lady in his Sunday
School class; the world knows it as Spindletop.
There, on January 10, 1901, engineer/driller
Anthony Lucas’ efforts to develop oil production
at Spindletop roared aloft in a gusher that shot
upward through the wooden drilling derrick
into the sky, then rained crude petroleum on the
startled crew.
Spindletop brought Jefferson County, Texas,
and the world into the age of oil. In its first year
the Spindletop field, with many wells tapping
into the subterranean pools of petroleum,
surpassed the nation’s oil production in
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere in Texas. The
J.M. Guffey Petroleum Company (later Gulf Oil
Company), The Texas Oil Company, Hughes
Tool Company, and other major oil enterprises
got their start at Spindletop, and also
participated in expanding oil discovery and
production elsewhere in Texas and eventually
the world. Oil and petroleum products soon
were in demand everywhere because of the rapid
development of automobiles with internal
combustion engines after the 1890s and the use
of oil as a fuel for railroad locomotives instead of
coal; the first locomotive powered by oil ran on
the Kansas City Southern line from Port Arthur
to Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Until deepwater port status was developed for
Beaumont and Orange, enabled by dredging
channels in the Neches and Sabine rivers to the
Port Arthur Canal, all the oil produced at
Spindletop was hauled and then piped to Port
Arthur for loading aboard ships for transport to
eastern American or other destinations. An
example was the Strombus; she took on sixty
thousand barrels of desulphurized oil at the
24 ✦ WATER, RAILS & OIL