A Monument

I live in a small East Texas town. For many, Kilgore, Texas seems inconsequential, but to those who know the town and its past, this little clearing among the tall pine trees is legendary. Founded as a refueling point when the railroad came through, for many years Kilgore served the cotton and peanut farmers. No tourists came through town in those days for there was little to see.

But in the early 1930’s, everything changed. Oil was discovered. A lake of black gold was under the town and all around. Kilgore became a boomtown, growing in population from a few thousand to more than thirty-thousand in a year’s time. The rush for gold only lasted a few years. By then, most land had been leased and the great rush to drill leveled out.

Not that everyone moved away from Kilgore and left a ghost town behind, for the production of oil continued for the next sixty years. Even today oil is pumped out of the ground here, but not on the scale of the 1940’s and 50’s.

My dad came to East Texas at the age of nineteen from Oklahoma. The Sooner State had turned into a dust bowl due to long years of drought, followed by the Great Depression of 1929. Many of the boomers who diverged on the small East Texas town came from the small oilfields of Oklahoma.

Monuments come in all shapes and sizes. Some are carved out of stone and others are molded into bronze. Great buildings are erected and named in tribute for famous people. Houses and buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright stand exemplary of his imagination and design skills.

For the people who grew up in and around Kilgore, we have a monument like no other to salute the heroics of our fathers. On one city block of downtown, there are tall metal oil derricks standing where oil wells stood for fifty or more years.

The city named the block of wells The World’s Richest Acre. At the height of the boom, buildings were torn down or made smaller and twenty-four wells were drilled. The wells flowed without pumping units for many years, with the gas pressures below the ground forcing the oil up the pipes. When the pressure dropped, the pumpers took over, drawing out the last of the precious substance.

The derricks are an oddity today with modern portable drilling rigs which carry their drilling derrick with them, but during the boom, in the rush to drill the wells and get rich, they would build the derricks and abandon them rather than take the time or expense of tearing them down.

More than eleven hundred oil wells were drilled within the city limits in the first ten years of discovery. As the city expanded its boundaries, many more wells were added to that total. There are wells in town still producing after seventy-five years.

As a young boy, I enjoyed seeing the derricks and thought every town had the same display. Our monuments are an interesting sight at anytime of the year, but at Christmas they become magical. Lighted stars are placed at the very top of the tall structures, and many have long strands of lights streaming down the four legs.

At the Richest Acre, the words Merry Christmas are spelled out in lights and strung and span between two derricks. Another display saying Happy New Year hangs between two other structures. Truly a sight for sore eyes.

This small town with its rich history is proud of its monuments and the oil boomers who came here and wrote our history. We have been blessed to live here as were our parents. Every Christmas as I drive through my hometown, a lump of pride swells inside me and I remember the people who gave this to us.