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The town of Kilgore is at the center of the vast East Texas Oil Field discovered in 1930. At times in the 1930s over 1,200 oil wells were producing inside the city limits. On part of one downtown block once stood the greatest concentration of oil wells in the world, producing more than 2 1/2 million barrels of oil. It became renowned as the "World's Richest Acre."
Prospectors were so hungry for oil that one well was drilled through the terrazzo floor of the Kilgore National Bank. One original and twelve new derricks now stand as monuments to the oil boom (stars atop the derricks are illuminated during the Christmas season). A historical marker details the crazed history of the downtown area.
These heady days are re-created in the East Texas Oil Museum on the campus of Kilgore College on Ross Street. The museum, a multi-million dollar facility financed by the Placid Oil Company owned by the Haroldson Lafayette Hunt family, opened in 1980. Hunt hailed from Illinois and made his first oil fortune in Arkansas but was financially crippled by played-out oil fields and Florida land deals gone astray before coming to Kilgore in 1930. By 1932, the 43-year old Hunt would have 900 oil wells in East Texas and within twenty years he would be acclaimed as "America's richest man."
The centerpiece of the East Texas oil Museum is a lifesize diorama called "Boomtown USA." Kilgore certainly qualified. The town was founded in 1872 on land purchased by the I & GN Railroad and for the next half-century its 500 residents farmed the land in peaceful obscurity. Then, in the fall of 1930 with the nation just beginning to experience the hardships of Depression, Hunt's Daisy Bradford #3 well tapped into the largest oil field in the "lower 48 states." Before Christmas there were 10,000 people living in Kilgore.
You can walk down a re-created street from 1930s Kilgore and relive the lives of wildcatters and roughnecks who came to town hoping to get rich. Along the street are the businesses that catered to these adventuresome oilmen. Tools and equipment reconstruct the oil drillerÕs life. Realistic touches include a period roadster mired in running-board high mud and a wagon pulled by real, albeit stuffed, mules. Talking mannequins explain the goings-on in oil-crazy Kilgore and "gas" can be pumped from antique Sinclair gasoline pumps.
The opulent "Boomtown Cinema" is open and the feature is a black-and-white film historical document that depicts oil being extracted from the Texas soil. As the well comes in, the floor quivers and the oil field workers are drenched by the blowing gusher.
The process of drilling for oil is created at the East Texas Oil Museum is depicted with a simulated 3,800-foot elevator ride through multiple layers of rock to the bountiful oil formations inside the Earth.
Outside the museum an ancient drilling rig stands as a monument to the pioneers of the Texas oil industry. The East Texas Oil Museum is open to the public from Tuesday to Sunday. A small admission fee is charged.
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