Kilgore, TX
The Oil Boom Lives on in Kilgore
“Daddy took me and my brother out there while they were drilling,” she recalls. “ Oh, there was so much excitement when it (the well) came in,” she recalls. Kilgore’s population mushroomed from 500 to more than 10,000 within a matter of weeks after the Daisy Bradford, Lou Della Crim, and Lathrop wells came in, one after another. In time, there would be hundreds of wells, then more than 1,000.
“People started descending on us in 1931,” says Griffin, who was then a fourth-grader. “On the first day of school in September, the playground was covered with children. They were from everywhere—New York, California, Ohio. I don’t know how the old people felt about it, but we kids just loved it.”
Today, the oil industry employs about 2,000 in the town of 11,472 in the rolling hills of east Texas’ Piney Woods. Oil has been joined by 30 manufacturers who employ 3,000 people making products ranging from bass boats to plumbing supplies to commercial satellite antennas. Kilgore College brings even more diversity to the town.
But the boom days live at the East Texas Oil Museum on the campus of Kilgore College. The museum recreates the discovery and production of oil. The people, their towns, tools, and pastimes are all colorfully depicted in dioramas, movies, sound presentations, and authentic antiques.
The museum lobby is decorated with hand-painted murals of early oil production, paintings of famous oilmen like “Dad” Joiner and “Doc” Lloyd, and a bigger-than-life bronze statue of H.L. Hunt, who won his first oil lease in a poker game and parlayed it into a fortune.
Step out of the lobby into Boomtown USA: a full-scale town full of stores, people, animals, and machinery depicting life in a booming oil town. Visitors can see historical film footage of the oil boom and experience what a blow-out gusher felt like in the Boomtown Theater, which shows film of a real gusher coming in while the floor shakes violently the way a gusher would shake the ground (from pent-up pressure being released).
Joe White, museum director, says more than a million people have visited the museum since it opened in October 1980.
“We now average about 50,000 a year. Guests come from all 50 states and over a hundred other countries,” he says.
Miller and Mary Welch, visitors from Lexington, Ky., remember reading about the east Texas oil boom. “I never realized, until now, how big it was,” Miller says. Mack Fondren, a newcomer to east Texas from Memphis, Tenn., says the realistic exhibits create a feel of the times. “It takes you there,” Fondren says.
Filmmakers have used the museum for documentaries, including three History Channel films, White says.
Kenneth Smart, the retired publisher of the local paper, volunteers at the museum. While the economic boost the town gets from museum visitors may be important, the good will it generates for the community is more important, Smart says.
“People appreciate the fact that a small town like Kilgore can provide such a high-quality museum. It’s a great place for area residents to bring out-of-town guests,’’ Smart says.
Carla Szafran, history instructor at Kilgore College, considers the museum a teaching tool. “Having the museum on campus,” she says, “has been a real asset to teachers—especially those of us who teach Texas history and government.”
The biggest change since the oil boom days is that Kilgore is much more diverse, Griffin says.
“Our size is about the same,” she says. “But our business and professional communities give us a diversity—a balance and stability we didn’t have back then. Once there were more than a thousand pumping oil wells inside the city limits.
“That’s all changed,” she explains. “There’s still enough oil in the ground that the oil industry will be a part of the economy. The difference is it’s no longer the TOTAL economy.”
Upload Your Own Stories, Photos and Videos
Related Stories
If you enjoyed reading this story, Kilgore, TX, then you might enjoy these other stories.Discuss this Article
