by Bruce Wells | Mar 2, 2025 | Petroleum Pioneers
As drillers and speculators rushed to Spindletop Hill, the Texas Company was organized in 1902.
A series of oil and natural gas discoveries at Sour Lake, Texas — near the famous 1901 gusher at Beaumont — helped launch the major oil company Texaco.
Originally known as Sour Lake Springs because of sulfurous spring water popular for its healing properties, a series of oil discoveries brought wealth and new petroleum companies to Hardin County in southeastern Texas.
“A forest of oil well derricks at Sour Lake, Texas,” is from the W.D. Hornaday Collection, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin. Oil discoveries at the resort town northwest of the world-famous Spindletop gusher of 1901 would transform the Texas Company.
As the science of petroleum exploration and production evolved, some geologists predicted oil was trapped at a salt dome at Sour Lake similar to that of Beaumont’s Spindletop Hill formation, which was producing massive amounts of oil.
According to Charles Warner in Texas Oil & Gas Since 1543, in November 1901 an exploratory well found “hot salt water impregnated with sulfur between 800 and 850 feet…and four oil sands about 10 feet thick at a depth of approximately 1,040 feet.”
Warner noted that the Sour Lake Springs field’s discovery well came four months later when a second attempt by the Great Western Company drilled “north of the old hotel building” in the vicinity of earlier shallow wells.
“This well secured gusher production at a depth of approximately 683 feet on March 7, 1902,” Warner reported. “The well penetrated 40 feet of oil sand. The flow of oil was accompanied by a considerable amount of loose sand, and it was necessary to close the well in from time to time and bail out the sand, after which the well would respond with excellent flows.”
A monument marks the site where in 1903 the Fee No. 3 well flowed at 5,000 barrels of oil a day, launching the Texas Company into becoming Texaco.
As more discoveries followed, Joseph “Buckskin Joe” Cullinan and Arnold Schlaet were among those who rushed to the area from their offices in Beaumont.
The Texas Company
The most significant company that started during the Spindletop oil boom was The Texas Company, according to historian Elton Gish.
“Cullinan worked in the Pennsylvania oil industry and later went to Corsicana, Texas, about 1898 when oil was first discovered in that district where he became the most prosperous operator in the field,” reported Gish in his “History of the Texas Company and Port Arthur Works Refinery.”
Cullinan formed the Petroleum Iron Works, building oil storage tanks in the Beaumont area — where he was introduced to Schlaet. “When the Spindletop boom came in January 1901, Mr. Cullinan decided to visit Beaumont,” Gish noted. Schlaet managed the oil business of two brothers, New York leather merchants.
Named after its New York City telegraph address, the Texaco brand became official in 1959. Postcard of a Texaco service station next to a cafe in Kingman, Arizona.
“Schlaet’s field superintendent, Charles Miller, traveled to Beaumont in 1901 to witness the Spindletop activity and met with Cullinan, whom he knew from the oil business in Pennsylvania. He liked Cullinan’s plans and asked Schlaet to join them in Beaumont.”
According to Texaco, Cullinan and Schlaet formed the Texas Company on April 7, 1902, by absorbing the Texas Fuel Company and inheriting its office in Beaumont. Texas Fuel had organized just one year earlier to purchase Spindletop oil, develop storage and transportation networks, and sell the oil to northern refineries.
By November 1902, the new Texas Company was establishing a new refinery in Port Arthur as well as 20 storage tanks, building its first marine vessel, and equipping an oil terminal to serve sugar plantations along the Mississippi River.
Fee No. 3 Discovery
The Texas Company struck oil at Sour Lake Springs in January 1903, “after gambling its future on the site’s drilling rights,” the company explained. “The discovery, during a heavy downpour near Sour Lake’s mineral springs, turned the company into a major oil producer overnight, validating the risk-taking insight of company co-founder J.S. Cullinan and the ability of driller Walter Sharp.”
A Texaco station was among the 2012 indoor exhibits featured at the National Route 66 Museum in Elk City, Oklahoma. Photo by Bruce Wells.
Their 1903 Hardin County discovery at Sour Lake Springs — the Fee No. 3 well — flowed at 5,000 barrels a day, securing the Texas Company’s success in petroleum exploration, production, transportation and refining. Sharp founded the Sharp-Hughes Tool Company in 1908 with Howard Hughes Sr.
High oil production levels from the Sour Lake field and other successful wells in the Humble oilfield (1905), secured the company’s financial base, according to L. W. Kemp and Cherie Voris in Handbook of Texas Online.
“In 1905 the Texas Company linked these two fields by pipelines to Port Arthur, ninety miles away, and built its first refinery there. That same year the company acquired an asphalt refinery at nearby Port Neches,” the authors noted.
“In 1908 the company completed the ambitious venture of a pipeline from the Glenn Pool, in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), to its Southeast Texas refineries,” added Kemp and Voris. “As early as 1905 the Texas Company had established marketing facilities not only throughout the United States, but also in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Panama.”
The Texas Company registered “Texaco” as a trademark in 1909.
The telegraph address for the company’s New York office is “Texaco” — a name soon applied to its products. The company registered its first trademark, the original red star with a green capital letter “T” superimposed on it in 1909. The letter remained an essential component of the logo for decades.
The Texas Corporation in August 1926 incorporated in Delaware (from Texas) and by an exchange of shares acquired outstanding stock of The Texas Company (Texas), which was dissolved the next year.
The new corporation became the parent company of numerous “Texas Company” — Texaco — entities and other subsidiaries, according to Jim Hinds of Columbus, Indiana (see Histories of Indian Refining, Havoline, and Texaco). By 1928, Texaco operated more than 4,000 gasoline stations in 48 states. It already was a major oil company when it officially renamed itself Texaco in 1959.
1987 Bankruptcy
Texaco lost a 1985 court battle following its purchase of Getty Oil Company. In February 1987 a Texas court upheld the decision against Texaco for having initiated an illegal takeover of Getty Oil after Pennzoil had made a bid for the company. Texaco filed for bankruptcy in April 1987.
The companies settled their historic $10.3 billion legal battle for $3 billion when Pennzoil agreed to drop its demand for interest. The Los Angeles Times reported the compromise was vital for Texaco emerging from bankruptcy, a haven sought to stop Pennzoil from enforcing the largest court judgment ever awarded at the time.
On October 9, 2001, Chevron and Texaco agreed to a merger that created ChevronTexaco — renamed Chevron in 2005. Although the Sour Lake Springs oil boom was surpassed by other Texas discoveries, it has remained the birthplace of Texaco.
Learn more about southeastern Texas petroleum history in Spindletop creates Modern Petroleum Industry and Prophet of Spindletop.
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Recommended Reading: The Texaco Story, The First Fifty Years 1902 – 1952 by Texas Company (1952). Texaco’s Port Arthur Works, A Legacy of Spindletop and Sour Lake (2003); Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery
(2008). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Sour Lake produces Texaco.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/sour-lake-produces-texaco. Last Updated: March 1, 2025. Original Published Date: April 5, 2014.
by Bruce Wells | Feb 25, 2025 | Petroleum Pioneers
A popular 1837 book by Washington Irving helped reveal natural resources of the Far West.
Tales of a Wyoming “tar spring” convinced the experienced Pennsylvania oilfield explorer Mike Murphy to drill a shallow well in 1883. He sold his oil to Union Pacific to lubricate train axles. Others would follow in the search for Wyoming oilfields.
Civil War veteran Philip Shannon explored for oil at Salt Creek outside of Casper in 1890. His well revealed what proved to be a 22,000-acre oilfield. An oil gusher drilled by a Dutch company made headlines in 1908.
But the story of Wyoming’s petroleum really began with Washington Irving, author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Feb 12, 2025 | Petroleum Pioneers
Reports of a “mineral tar” from the 1840s helped H.L. Hunt discover an oilfield a century later.
Swallowing “tar pills” supposedly had been curing ills since the mid-1800s, but Alabama’s petroleum industry officially began in 1944 with a Choctaw County well drilled by a well-known Texas wildcatter. On February 17, independent producer Haroldson Lafayette “H.L” Hunt completed his Jackson No. 1 well after discovering Alabama’s first oilfield.
H.L. Hunt had found success in the earliest Arkansas oilfields of the 1920s and even greater success in the East Texas oilfield of the 1930s. He now had revealed the Gilbertown oilfield of western Alabama, about 50 miles southeast of Meridian, Mississippi.
Geological Map of Alabama, printed in 1849 by Michael Tuomey, professor of geology, mineralogy and agricultural chemistry at the University of Alabama. Tuomey published his First Biennial Report of the Geology of Alabama in 1850. Map courtesy University of Alabama Libraries Special Collections.
Despite limited knowledge of the state’s geology, regions with oil and natural gas seeps had attracted interest as early as the mid-19th century. Before Hunt’s Choctaw County wildcat well, 350 dry holes had been drilled in Alabama.
Geologist and petroleum historian Ray Sorenson has investigated the earliest reports of petroleum in all producing states. By the early 2020s, his ongoing project documented the first signs of oil in the United States, Canada, and many parts of the world (see Exploring Earliest Signs of Oil).
In Alabama’s case, Sorenson uncovered an account by an early expert in the scientific field of geology. The first Alabama state geologist, Michael Tuomey, described reports of a “mineral tar,” and cited an 1840s account of finding natural oil seeps six miles from Oakville in Lawrence County.
With quantities of oil and water emerging from a crevice in limestone, Tuomey observed that “the tar, or bitumen, floats on the surface, a black film very cohesive and insoluble in water.”
The A.R. Jackson No. 1 well in 1944 revealed an Alabama oilfield near the Mississippi border. Photo courtesy Hunt Oil Company.
Similar to “Kentucky oil,” Alabama’s Lawrence County oil became popular for its medicinal qualities. Oil from the county was claimed to be “a known cure for Scrofula, Cancerous Sores, Rheumatism, Dyspepsia,” and other diseases.
“Patients visiting the Spring find the tar taken and swallowed as pills, the most efficient form of the remedy,” Tuomey quoted the observation from “Tar Spring of Lawrence” in the 1858 Second Biennial Report On the Geology of Alabama (published one year after his death).
Tuomey served as the state geologist of South Carolina from 1844 to 1847, and as the first state geologist of Alabama from 1848 until his death in 1857. His Geological Map of Alabama was printed in 1849.
In addition to oil, traces of natural gas were discovered in Alabama in the late 1880s, and by 1902, natural gas was being supplied to Huntsville and the town of Hazel Green, according to Alabama historian Alan Cockrell.
“In 1909, a small discovery by Eureka Oil and Gas at Fayette fueled that city’s streetlights for a time, but no natural gas was recovered anywhere in the state for several decades afterward,” he added. Learn about the earliest oilfield discoveries in other producing states in First Oil Discoveries.
Gilbertown Oil Discovery
According to Cockrell, Alabama’s oil and natural gas industry did not truly begin until H.L. Hunt of Dallas, Texas, drilled in Choctaw County near the Mississippi border and discovered the Gilbertown oilfield.
Concrete foundations are all that remains of Alabama’s first oil well, the A.R. Jackson Well No. 1, completed in 1944 near Gilbertown. Photo courtesy Explore Rural S.W. Alabama.
After five weeks of drilling, the well was completed on February 17, 1944, at 2,585 feet in the Selma chalk of the Upper Cretaceous. Hunt’s A.R. Jackson Well No. 1 two miles southwest of downtown Gilbertown had reached a total depth of 5,380 feet before being “plugged back” to its most productive oil-producing geologic formation.
H.L. Hunt’s first Alabama oil well produced just 30 barrels of oil a day, but launched the state’s petroleum industry. “The discovery of this well led to the creation of the State Oil and Gas Board of Alabama in 1945, and to the development and growth of the petroleum industry in Alabama,” notes an Alabama historic marker erected at the site.
Deeper drilling led to more Alabama petroleum discoveries in the 1980s. Map courtesy Encyclopedia of Alabama.
The first oilfield would produce 15 million barrels of oil, “not a lot by modern standards but enough to make ‘oil fever’ spread rapidly,” Cockrell noted in “Oil and Gas Industry in Alabama” in 2008. The search for another oilfield took 11 more years.
The 1955 oil discovery at Citronelle, a town above a geologic salt dome, finally launched a new drilling boom; five new Alabama oilfields were discovered by 1967. Mobil Oil Company drilled Alabama’s first successful offshore natural gas well in 1981.
As production technologies advance, geologists believe opportunities exist in the “hard shales of the deep Black Warrior Basin beneath Pickens and Tuscaloosa counties and in the thick fractured shales of St. Clair and neighboring counties,” according to Cockrell.
By 2022, more than 17,500 oil and natural gas wells had been drilled in Alabama since the state’s first commercial oil discovery in 1944. According to the Washington, DC-based Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), about 10 percent of the Alabama wells produced oil, 59 percent natural gas, and 30 percent (about 5,000 wells) were nonproductive.
Mapping Mineral Riches
From the journal Cartographic Perspectives of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS):
Settlement of the newly available land enabled Alabama to move rapidly from being a part of the Mississippi Territory to its own Alabama Territory, and finally to statehood in 1819. The favorable climate and rich soil brought large plantations and slavery.
Appointed State Geologist of Alabama in 1848, Michael Tuomey served until his death in 1857.
Michael Tuomey (1805-1857), professor of geology at the University of Alabama in the 1840s, had attempted to lead Alabama’s economy away from slavery-based agriculture. In 1849, he produced the first survey of the state’s mineral wealth. His map Geological map of Alabama showed exactly where the state’s natural riches were located. The efforts of Tuomey and others were rejected, as were similar efforts in other southern states.
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Recommended Reading: Lost Worlds in Alabama Rocks: A Guide
(2000). Drilling Ahead, The Quest for Oil in the Deep South, 1945-2005 (2005). Your Amazon purchases benefit the American Oil & Gas Historical Society.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “First Alabama Oil Well.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/first-alabama-oil-well. Last Updated: February 12, 2025. Original Published Date: October 21, 2017.
by Bruce Wells | Feb 6, 2025 | Petroleum Pioneers
Wildcat wells near Reno inspired decades of gambling.
The search for commercial amounts of petroleum in Nevada began in 1907 with a well drilled southwest of Reno. After reaching a depth of 1,890 feet, the remote wildcat in Washoe County proved unproductive — an expensive “dry hole.”
A second exploratory well was rumored to have been drilled seeking an oilfield northwest of Reno, but few details about it survived since drilling permits were not required until 1953. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Jan 21, 2025 | Petroleum Pioneers
Once called night riders of the hemlocks, petroleum sleuths separated oil well fact from fiction.
In the hard winter of 1888, 37-year-old oil scout Justus C. McMullen succumbed to pneumonia contracted while investigating oil production from a well in densely wooded hills near Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. McMullen, publisher of the Bradford “Petroleum Age” newspaper, already had contributed much to America’s early petroleum industry as a journalist and oilfield detective.
(more…)
by Bruce Wells | Jan 17, 2025 | Petroleum Pioneers
When a Fort Worth independent producer completed a remote wildcat well in East Texas on January 26,1931, the well revealed the true extent of an oilfield discovered months earlier and many miles away.
As the Great Depression worsened and East Texas farmers struggled to survive, W.A. “Monty” Moncrief and two partners drilled the Lathrop No. 1 well in Gregg County. When completed in 1931, their well produced 320 barrels of oil per hour from a depth of 3,587 feet.
Far from what earlier were thought to be two oilfield discoveries — this third well producing 7,680 barrels a day revealed a “Black Giant.”
A circa 1960 photograph of W.A. “Monty” Moncrief and his son “Tex” in Fort Worth’s Moncrief Building.
Moncrief, who had worked for Marland Oil Company in Fort Worth after returning from World War I, drilled in an region (and a depth) where few geologists thought petroleum production a possibility. He and fellow independent operators John Ferrell and Eddie Showers thought otherwise.
The third East Texas well was completed 25 miles north of Rusk County’s already famous October 1930 Daisy Bradford No. 3 well drilled by Columbus Marion “Dad” Joiner northwest of Henderson (and southeast New London, site of a tragic 1937 school explosion).
Moncrief’s oil discovery came 15 miles north of the Lou Della Crim No. 1 well, drilled three days after Christmas, on “Mama” Crim’s farm about nine miles from the Joiner well. At first, the distances between these “wildcat” discoveries convinced geologists, petroleum engineers (and experts at the large oil companies) the wells were small, separate oilfields. They were wrong.
Three Wells, One Giant Oilfield
To the delight of other independent producers and many small, struggling farmers, Moncrief’s Lathrop discovery showed that the three wells were part of a single petroleum-producing field. Further development and a forest of steel derricks revealed the northernmost extension of the 130,000-acre East Texas oilfield.
The history of the petroleum industry’s gigantic oilfield has been preserved at the East Texas Oil Museum, which opened at Kilgore College in 1980. Joe White, the museum’s founding director, created exhibit spaces for the “authentic recreation of the oil discoveries and production in the early 1930s in the largest oilfield inside U.S. boundaries.”
After more than half a century of major discoveries, William Alvin “Monty” Moncrief died in 1986. His legacy has extended beyond his good fortune in East Texas.
The family exploration business established by Moncrief in 1929 would be led by sons W.A. “Tex” Moncrief Jr. and C.B. “Charlie” Moncrief, who grew up in the exploration business. In 2010, Forbes reported that 94-year-old “Tex” made “perhaps the biggest find of his life” by discovering an offshore field of about six trillion cubic feet of gas.
Moncrief Philanthropy
Hospitals in communities near the senior Moncrief’s nationwide discoveries, including a giant oilfield in Jay, Florida, revealed in 1970, and another in Louisiana, have benefited from his drilling acumen.
The 130,000-acre East Texas oilfield became the largest in the contiguous United States in 1930.
Moncrief and his wife established the William A. and Elizabeth B. Moncrief Foundation and the Moncrief Radiation Center in Fort Worth, as well as the Moncrief Annex of the All Saints Hospital. Buildings in their honor have been erected at Texas Christian University, All Saints School, and Fort Worth Country Day School.
Dr. Daniel Podolsky in 2013 presented W.A. “Tex” Moncrief Jr. with a framed image of the new Moncrief Cancer Institute at the Fort Worth facility’s dedication ceremony.
Supported throughout the 1960s and 1970s by the Moncrief family, Fort Worth’s original Cancer Center, known as the Radiation Center, was founded in 1958 as one of the nation’s first community radiation facilities.
In 2013, the $22 million Moncrief Cancer Institute was dedicated during a ceremony attended by “Tex” Moncrief Jr. “One man’s vision for a place that would make life better for cancer survivors is now a reality in Fort Worth,” noted one reporter at the dedication of the 3.4-acre facility at 400 W. Magnolia Avenue.
Small investments from hopeful Texas farmers will bring historic results — and make Kilgore, Longview and Tyler boom towns during the Great Depression. Kilgore today celebrates its petroleum heritage.
Early Days in Oklahoma
Born in Sulphur Springs, Texas, on August 25, 1895, Moncrief grew up in Checotah, Oklahoma, where his family moved when he was five. Checotah was the town where Moncrief attended high school, taking typing and shorthand — and excelling to the point that he became a court reporter in Eufaula, Oklahoma.
To get an education, Moncrief saved $150 to enroll at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, where he worked in the registrar’s office. He became “Monty” after his initiation into the Sigma Chi fraternity.
During World War I, Moncrief volunteered and joined the U.S. Cavalry. He was sent to officer training camp in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he met, and six months later married, Mary Elizabeth Bright on May 28, 1918. Sent to France, Moncrief saw no combat thanks to the Armistice being signed before his battalion reached the front.
After the war, Moncrief returned to Oklahoma where he found work at Marland Oil, first in its accounting department and later in its land office. When Marland opened offices in Fort Worth in the late 1920s, Moncrief was promoted to vice president for the new division.
In 1929, Moncrief would strike out on his own as an independent operator. He teamed up with John Ferrell and Eddie Showers, and they bought leases where they ultimately drilled the successful F.K. Lathrop No. 1 well.
C.M. “Dad” Joiner’s partner, the 300-pound self-taught geologist A.D. “Doc” Lloyd, had predicted the field would be four to ten miles wide and 50 to 50 miles long, according to Moncrief, interviewed in 1985 for Wildcatter: A Story of Texas Oil.
“Of course, everyone at the time thought he was nuts, including me,” the Texas wildcatter added. Also interviewed, museum founder Joe White said Lloyd’s assessment predicted the Woodbine sands at a depth of 3,550 — about two thousand of feet shallower than major oil company geologists believed.
Moncrief’s Lathrop January 1931 wildcat well, which produced from the Woodbine formation at a depth of 3,587 feet, proved the oilfield stretched 42 miles long and up to eight miles wide — the largest in the lower-48 states.
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Recommended Reading: The Black Giant: A History of the East Texas Oil Field and Oil Industry Skulduggery & Trivia
(2003); Early Texas Oil: A Photographic History, 1866-1936
(2000). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Moncrief makes East Texas History.” Authors: B.A. and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/moncrief-oil. Last Updated: January 17, 2025. Original Published Date: January 25, 2015.
