In the late 19th century, George W. Vanderbilt II opened a mansion on the outskirts of Asheville, North Carolina. Called Biltmore, it was the largest home to ever be built in America, and a wonder of Gilded Age architecture. After only a few decades, however, Biltmore sat almost empty, and was on the brink of being sold by the Vanderbilt family. With the help of Vanderbilt’s grandson William Cecil, Biltmore made a comeback in the 20th century, and has since grown into one of the largest historic tourist attractions in the United States.
The Gilded Age: Making Way for the Biltmore Estate
Breaking ground in 1889, Biltmore was the vision of George Washington Vanderbilt II, the youngest child of railroad tycoon William Henry Vanderbilt and his wife Maria Louisa Kissam. At the beginning of Biltmore’s construction, the United States had reached the peak of what historians now call the Gilded Age, a time period which lasted from the 1870s until the early 1900s. Named after Mark Twain’s novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, the era coincided with the second Industrial Revolution, which brought a rapid surge in wealth in several areas of the country. This increase in monetary capital led to a rise in the wages for skilled workers, and immigrants from around the world were soon pouring into the United States, looking to take their own cut of the growing national fortune.
Oheka Castle in Long Island, one of the major Gilded Age mansions. Reprinted from Oheka Castle by Joan Cergol and Ellen Schaffer, courtesy of Oheka Castle Hotel & Estate.
However, this influx of settlers also caused a major wage gap, as there were not enough jobs to sustain the amount of people who arrived searching for work. As a result, many citizens and immigrants lived within poverty, while a lucky few amassed a seemingly-infinite amount of affluence. This inequality, criticized by Twain in his novel, resulted in a society where the suffering of the masses was masked by the rich with a thin veneer of “gilding,” or golden covering. Despite the vast socioeconomic issues, money continued to accumulate in the country amongst lucky businessmen, whom became tycoons of industry. This disparity between the rich and poor would remain until well into the 20th century.
Gilded Age Architecture and the Vanderbilt Estates
To showcase their success, the wealthy families of the Gilded Age often built elaborate and luxurious homes for themselves, and the time period soon became known for its lavish mansions and estates. Mansions like Oheka Castle in Long Island, New York, or the Conyers Estate in Greenwich, Connecticut stood as the ultimate symbols of affluence in the time period, and came to be envied by the masses.
However, these smaller estates paled in comparison to the creations of the famous Vanderbilt family. Perhaps the most successful Gilded Age clan, the Vanderbilts rose to prominence on the coattails (and fortune of) Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, who built the family’s railroad empire, including the illustrious New York Central Railroad. Not unlike the Kennedy family, the Vanderbilts were major American celebrities, and they led opulent lives closely followed by the public and media. Their homes were no exception to the greater mansion trend, and Biltmore became one of seven different Gilded Age Vanderbilt mansions, including:
Townhouse – The main residence of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Townhouse (otherwise known as the Cornelius Vanderbilt II House) was located in Manhattan, New York. The largest private residence to have ever been built in the borough, Townhouse was constructed in 1883, but later demolished.
Woodlea – Built in Scarborough, New York by Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard, Woodlea was constructed from 1892 to 1895. The mansion was originally built as a 140-room private residence, but today serves as the Sleepy Hollow Country Club.
Marble House – Also located in Newport, Rhode Island, the Marble House was built by William Kissam Vanderbilt between 1888 and 1892 as a summer “cottage.” The mansion, which has 50 rooms, once commanded a staff of 36 servants, and cost nearly $300 million in today’s dollars to build.
Florham – The eighth largest house in the United States, Florham is located in Madison, New Jersey. Commissioned by Florence Adele Vanderbilt between 1893 and 1899 in the English-baroque style, the mansion now serves as the centerpiece to Farleigh Dickinson University.
Rough Point – Originally created for Frederick William Vanderbilt, Rough Point (like many Vanderbilt mansions) is located in Newport, Rhode Island, on a 10-acre estate. While other Vanderbilt mansions were left abandoned for several decades after their original owners vacated, Rough Point was inhabited until the 1990s, and is today open as a museum.
Hyde Park – Also known as the Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site, Hyde Park was one of many homes owned by Frederick William Vanderbilt. The 54-room mansion is located in Hyde Park, New York, and was constructed from 1896 to 1899. Today, it serves as a historic home and museum, and has been a National Historic Landmark since 1940.
Building Biltmore: Constructing America’s Largest Home
While the Vanderbilt estates were all impressive in their own right, none could compare to Biltmore – at 175,000 square feet, Biltmore is still the largest private residence in the United States. Originally intended as the home of George W. Vanderbilt II, it was built in the French chateau style in Asheville, North Carolina, an area George had visited with his mother as a young man. Referring to Asheville as his “little mountain escape,” Vanderbilt soon took a note from his older siblings, and broke ground on his estate in 1889, which he chose to name after the family’s homeland in Holland.
George W. Vanderbilt II in 1914.
Edith Stuyvesant Dresser in 1898.
At its inception, Vanderbilt envisioned Biltmore as a self-sustaining enterprise, not unlike traditional English estates. The estate, which included not only the mansion, but also 125,000 acres of land, would sustain itself with a small surrounding village, which Vanderbilt dubbed “Biltmore Village.”
Construction of the massive 250-room mansion and the surrounding estate took six years to complete, and George finally opened his new home to family and friends on Christmas Eve, 1895. Soon after, he married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser (a descendent of Peter Stuyvesant, the first governor of the Dutch colony in present-day New York) in 1898, and the two returned to live full-time at the Biltmore Estate.
The Vanderbilts lived for a couple of years at Biltmore together before welcoming their daughter (and only child), Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt, who was born in the mansion’s Louis XV room in 1900. Cornelia was subsequently raised on the estate, attending both school and weekly church services in Biltmore Village.
Cornelia Vanderbilt, also called “Tarheel Nell” in 1924. Reprinted from Biltmore Estate by Ellen Erwin Rickman.
George Vanderbilt’s dream of a self-sustaining estate seemed realized in the early days of Biltmore, but was nearly shattered after George’s untimely death in 1914. The estate, which was willed to Cornelia, became the responsibility of her mother Edith, as she was only 14 at the time of her father’s death.
Edith subsequently finalized the sale of 87,000 acres of the Biltmore estate to the federal government (a deal George had been working on before his death), which she sold on the promise that the land would remain unaltered. This land went on to become the nucleus of Pisgah National Forest. Other sections of the estate were sold off as well, including Biltmore Village, and Edith only occasionally stayed in the mansion while her daughter attended school elsewhere.
Biltmore: The War Years
The Vanderbilt family would not return full-time to Biltmore until Cornelia’s wedding in 1924 to the Honorable John Francis Amherst Cecil, a descendent of Queen Elizabeth I’s top-advisor William Cecil. John and Cornelia chose to reside at Biltmore, where they had two sons: George Henry Vanderbilt Cecil (born in 1925), and William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil (born in 1928). Both boys were born in the Louis XV room of Biltmore like their mother, and were also raised on the estate.
During this time, the Vanderbilts (at the urging of the city of Asheville) opened up the Biltmore estate for the first time to the public, hoping to generate much needed revenue during the Great Depression. However, the house did not receive many visitors during these years, and by World War II the estate had once again closed to the public. During the war, Biltmore was used to house and protect various artworks, including works by Raphael, Rembrandt, and Gilbert Stuart’s famed portrait of George Washington.
Despite the estate’s economic hardships during the Great Depression, Cornelia’s sons spent many of their formative years split between an education in Europe, and holidays spent at Biltmore. The Cecil’s eventually divorced in 1934, and Cornelia left the estate, moving abroad to France. She never returned to Biltmore. John Cecil maintained residence at Biltmore, living in a suite of rooms until his death in 1954.
Rebuilding Biltmore
By the time William (better known as Bill) Cecil had graduated from Harvard University in the mid-20th century, Biltmore had fallen into a state of disrepair, and was losing over $250,000 USD per year. The estate was supported only by a profitable dairy operation, which could not sustain the losses of the mansion itself.
In an attempt to save the estate from being sold away from the family, Bill Cecil moved from a junior officer position with Chase National (now Chase Manhattan) to Biltmore with his wife and children at the end of the 1950s. Cecil’s quest to help rebuild Biltmore would prove a long one: Following the death of his mother in 1974, his older brother George inherited the already-successful Biltmore farm operations and estate grounds, while he inherited the mansion itself.
William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil in 1930, at approximately age 2. Reprinted from Biltmore Estate by Ellen Erwin Rickman.
Calling on his grandfather’s dream of a self-sustaining estate, Bill attempted to turn the Biltmore house into a desirable tourist destination during the 1960s. Using careful marketing techniques, Cecil attempted to promote Biltmore to the public. One notable example was quite direct: along with placing an eight-page ad for the house in local newspapers, Cecil published an offer for a free turn of the century recipe from the Biltmore kitchens. The offer eventually became so popular that Cecil began charging a quarter for the recipe, and the money (with self-addressed envelopes for the recipe) rolled in.
Not all of Bill’s marketing was direct, however – for example, when an eclipse occurred in Asheville during the 1960s, Cecil gave photos of the phenomenon (which had been difficult to obtain) to the press free of charge. The photos also just “happened” to include Biltmore’s silhouette. These efforts all focused on the tourism aspect of Biltmore, although Cecil did experiment with other projects to increase house revenue, like small farming experiments.
Cecil’s dedication to Biltmore finally began to pay off after eight years of managing the estate. In a 1968 financial report, Biltmore turned a meager profit of $16.34, which was a long call from losing a quarter of a million dollars per year. By 1979, over 350,000 people had visited Biltmore in a just a year, and as the estate began to turn a real profit, Bill looked for new ways to grow the estate, and develop it into a self-sustaining force. His contributions to Biltmore’s development are innumerable, but some highlights include:
The Biltmore Winery: Established in 1985, Cecil believed the estate needed a village winery to complete its image as a French chateau. Residing in Biltmore Antler Hill village, the winery is said to have been Bill’s favorite addition to the estate, and now sells over 90,000 cases of wine per year.
Deerpark Restaurant: Opened in 1979, the restaurant was opened to help drive tourists to not only visit, but also dine or stay on the estate. It is still in operation today as a Southern-style buffet restaurant.
Stable Café: Opened in 1987, the café is part of the larger Stable complex that Cecil also helped to construct. The restaurant continues to operate, offering mainly barbecue dishes.
Celebrating the estate’s 100th anniversary in 1995, Cecil opened several different attractions at the estate, including a welcome center for visitors, an ice cream parlor, and two restaurants: A Gardner’s Place, and the Bistro.
The Inn on Biltmore Estate: Opened in 2001, the four-star hotel was commissioned during Cecil’s time on Biltmore’s board of directors.
In addition to these achievements, Cecil is also credited with placing Biltmore on the National Register of Historic Places, which it joined in 1966.
Biltmore Today
Although Bill Cecil stepped down from day-to-day operations at Biltmore in 1995, he remained the chairman of the site’s board of directors until his passing in October 2017. However, the estate has not left family hands: run by Cecil’s children, the current CEO of Biltmore is Bill Cecil Jr., and Cecil’s daughter Dini Pickering assists in day-to-day operations.
The east elevation of Biltmore Estate in 1910. The grounds of the estate were designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Reprinted from Biltmore Estate by Ellen Erwin Rickman.
Today, Biltmore is visited by over one million people per year and is a subsidiary of Cecil’s company The Biltmore Company. This company oversees both the Biltmore mansion and its other associated business (such as the winery). The product of George W. Vanderbilt II and Bill Cecil’s labor of love, the estate profits approximately 50 million USD per year, and stands as a national icon to the Vanderbilt family and the Gilded Age period.
Have you ever visited Biltmore? What did you think? Let us know in the comments!
For a brief moment that most would struggle to call “shining,” the town of Borger, Texas was on the way to becoming one of the great boomtowns of Texas oil history. But greed and grift sent the Panhandle town on a different path.
Even stay-at-home Yankees who have never have ventured west of New England will recognize the iconic shape of the Lone Star State. When asked to identify the Panhandle, they usually succeed in pointing to the northernmost extremity that sticks out like an iron skillet. But Borger? Few could find it on a map today — but that was not the case 100 years ago, when Borger took center-stage first as an oil boomtown and eventually as one of the most corrupt towns in the Panhandle–or maybe all of Texas.
Twenty-six square counties arranged in five neat rows make up the Panhandle. In terms of geography, history and culture, it has always been the most isolated section of Texas, a world unto itself, sharing more in common with eastern New Mexico and western Oklahoma than with the rest of the sprawling state.
Well into the third decade of the twentieth century, the Panhandle was cattle country with many more inhabitants walking around on four feet than on two. Amarillo, the only town of any size, counted a mere 15,494 heads in the census of 1920 but still dwarfed a scattering of smaller communities with populations below 2,000.
Oil came to the Panhandle in stages over eight long and drawn-out years of exploration on a shoestring budget. In 1918, a group of Amarillo businessmen, eager to imitate the instant millionaires in the eastern half of Texas, contacted a geology professor at the University of Oklahoma who had studied the underground formations in the Panhandle at the turn of the century. Even though he had been searching for water at the time, the geologist did recall an area along the Canadian River north of Amarillo that looked promising for natural gas and possibly oil.
Drilling on the businessmen’s dime, the professor found gas nine out of ten times. However, oil proved more elusive, and the first producing well was not drilled until 1923.
Halfway across the state of Oklahoma, Asa Phillip Borger could smell opportunity in the Texas Panhandle. The Missouri-born real estate promoter whom everyone called “Ace,” maybe because he always seemed to have one up his sleeve, had made a fortune in the past decade and a half by creating start-up communities from nothing and by giving a new lease on life to dying towns.
At twenty-seven, Borger was doing right well for himself with a lumberyard in his birthplace of Carthage, Missouri, but wanted more out of life—a whole lot more. So in 1915, Ace talked his brother Pete into having a go at the real estate game in Pilcher, the center of lead and zinc mining in eastern Oklahoma.
The amateurs turned a modest profit in their maiden attempt at land hawking, but the money and experience were nothing compared to their partnership with the “King of the Wildcatters.” Tom Slick Sr. was the first of a long line of oil prospectors to have that title temporarily bestowed on him.
The Borger boys teamed up with Tom Sr. in 1917 to pull a boomtown out of thin air. The wildcatter had struck it rich again, this time between Tulsa and Bristow, and needed a pair of able hands to build the necessary infrastructure from the ground up. Under Slick’s tutelage, Ace and Pete learned how to buy land on the cheap, divide it into town lots, sell the lots for a sky-is-the-limit price, organize and staff a local government under their absolute control and satisfy the wants and needs of the people who flocked to the new speck on the map.
The Borgers and Slick Sr. soon parted company, presumably on good terms and all three with fatter wallets. Ace, with Pete in his role of low-profile junior partner, exploited the next big boom in the Greater Seminole Oil Field due east of Oklahoma City. After a tumultuous interlude in Cromwell, they set their sights on the Lone Star State.
On a crisp winter day in 1926, Ace saddled his horse for a close-up look at the next big oil boom that had everyone talking. This seemingly routine speculating trip would end up altering Texas Oil History as anyone knew it. Riding to the crest of the highest hill he could find, he surveyed the barren landscape down below. There was not a single tree or man-made edifice in sight, only a solitary derrick.
But that was what Ace Borger had ridden so far to see. Oil in the Texas Panhandle was neither a myth nor a mirage, and by seizing the moment, he could be in charge from the opening bell. Ace had learned from his mistakes in Cromwell, where the people who already lived pressured him into sharing power and the spoils. In his mind, he had bent over backward to accommodate those nit-picking yokels only to have them turn on him.
This time Ace would take a page from Tom Slick’s playbook by starting with a clean slate. And like Slick, he would give his town his name: Borger.
Ace moved with lightning speed. He paid a rancher $12,000 for 240 acres, filed the obligatory forms with the state and on March 8, 1926, opened the office of the Borger Townsite Company. He ran full-page advertisements in the Amarillo dailies and the small-town weeklies under the bold headline:
“Your Opportunity Lies in Borger The New Town of The Plains.”
This was the oil well Asa “Ace” Borger rode from Oklahoma to see in 1926. Legends of America.
On Main and three other streets, 20- by 120-foot lots sold for $1,500 with a down payment of $450. At the close of business opening day, the cash receipts totaled over $60,000. In six frenzied months, the Borger Townsite Company would clear a cool million on Ace’s $12,000 in seed money.
No one can say for sure how many people ended up in Borger or when they got there. The Handbook of Texas, the recognized authority on all things Texan, states: “Within ninety days of its founding, sensational advertising and the lure of ‘black gold’ brought over 45,000 men and women to the new boomtown.” Fantastic as it may sound today, that ballpark figure coincides with other educated guesses of the time.
To put it in historical perspective, a population of 45,000 would have made Ace’s Panhandle paradise the sixth- largest city in the Lone Star State in the mid-’20s behind only Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio.
Borger found a place for his cronies from Cromwell. John R. Miller, his personal attorney and trouble shooter, filled the office of mayor in a sham election following incorporation in late October 1926.
Miller in turn invited “Two Gun” Dick Herwig to establish his own corrupt and ruthless brand of law enforcement with “officers,” to use the term loosely, of his own choosing. To keep the roughnecks and the rest of the oilfield labor force entertained and broke, Miller brought in Ma and Pa Murphy, two more Cromwell veterans with their obedient band of prostitutes.
While Ace publicly distanced himself from Herwig and the Murphys in order to maintain his carefully cultivated illusion of respectability, there can be no question that he personally profited from their criminal activities.
“Once again Bartee brings to life characters you never heard of before.”
Dick Herwig was a convicted murderer who, rumor had it, bought his way out of a long prison term in Oklahoma. True or not, the fact remained that he spent less than a decade behind bars on a ninety-nine-year rap. Herwig’s moniker came from the pair of pearl-handle revolvers that appeared to be permanently attached to his hips. Pistol-whipping was one of his favorite pastimes, which the sadist practiced on defenseless victims whenever the mood struck him
The chief deputy or town marshal—Herwig went by both titles—was as clever as he was corrupt. His network of stills produced an endless supply of rotgut whiskey that twenty-four-hour saloons like the Rattlesnake Inn and Bloody Bucket were required to buy.
“Booger Town,” as local smart-alecks referred to Ace Borger’s pride and joy, went full blast through the end of 1926. Five hundred miles from Austin, the boomtown attracted about as much attention as the dark side of the moon in the state capitol.
Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, wife of scandal-plagued “Farmer Jim” and the first woman elected governor of any state, was a live-and-let-live chief executive who pardoned two thousand Texans convicted under the state prohibition statute. She was not inclined to punish folks in faraway Borger, wherever that was, for letting their hair down.
Governor Dan Moody was prepared to wash his hands of “Bloody Borger” until the assassination of the crime-fighting DA forced him to declare martial law. RGD0005F0656A-001, Houston Public Library, HMRC.
For reasons that had nothing to do with the wild goings-on in the Panhandle, voters denied Mrs. Ferguson the traditional second term. As a Central Texas district attorney, Dan Moody had helped to turn the tide against the Ku Klux Klan with successful prosecutions of the nightriders for their cowardly crimes. Elected attorney general in 1924 at the age of thirty-one, Moody humiliated the incumbent and her impeached husband two years later in the Democratic runoff for the gubernatorial nomination, which was tantamount to victory in one-party Texas where Republicans were about as popular as horse thieves.
The wide-open boomtown in the Panhandle did not figure prominently in Dan Moody’s bid for the Lone Star State’s highest office nor did he put a Borger housecleaning on his list of campaign promises. With much bigger fish to fry, the youngest governor in Texas history could have followed his predecessor’s example and done nothing at all.
But that was not in Governor Moody’s law-and-order nature.
Moody had been in office less than three months when he sent Captain Frank Hamer of the Texas Rangers (who would later bust the “Texas Chicken Ranch” that inspired The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) on an inspection tour of Borger. Two days later, on April 6, 1927, the future bushwhacker of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker reported, “The worst crime ring I have seen in my 23 years as an officer exists in Borger.”
That was all the governor needed to hear. Moody dispatched eight Rangers under the joint command of Captains William W. Sterling and Tom Hickman to Borger with crystal-clear orders not to return “until the lawless unconditionally surrender.”
On April 17, the day Sterling arrived, an inquisitive reporter asked how the legendary lawman planned on making the bad guys behave. He answered that the Rangers were “Where the criminals have been killing officers, we are going to kill off some crooks.” That rhetorical shot over the bow sent practically all of the gamblers, bootleggers, pimps, prostitutes and other parasites packing.
Fearing the state cops would be coming for him, a safe bet under the circumstances, “Two-Gun” Dick Herwig skipped town with his ill-gotten gains. But he made two dumb mistakes: First, Herwig stopped far too soon—less than ten miles inside New Mexico. Second, he bought a roadhouse and thumbed his nose at Lone Star authorities with a giant sign that declared: “Eight Miles From Texas Rangers.”
Meanwhile in Borger, the Rangers, backed by a beefed-up contingent of U.S. marshals and Prohibition agents, dismantled the criminal infrastructure piece by piece. Two dozen bars and gambling joints were shut down tighter than a drum, a river of illegal spirits was seized and dumped in the nearest gutter and the stills that produced Herwig’s official whiskey and beer were destroyed. Several hundred federal offenders were rounded up and marched to a domino parlor where they were given the choice of Leavenworth or voluntary relocation. Their duty done, the feds left town and the Rangers in charge, and at the end of the month—April 1927—they proclaimed Borger to be “100 percent better.”
As a rule, the Texas Rangers were sharply critical of local law enforcement. Even on those occasions when the police and sheriff were honest and aboveboard, the Rangers felt they rarely measured up to their own high standards.
However, prior to the decontamination of Borger, the Rangers encountered a police chief they came to accept as an equal. The Ranger trio assigned to the northern Panhandle needed canine assistance in tracking down the killer of the wife of a gas station owner, and the closest bloodhounds belonged to the police chief at Plainview, 125 miles to the south. H.H. Murray was happy to lend a hand, or in this case a paw, and drove to Borger the next day—January 16, 1927—with his three dogs.
The bloodhounds picked up the suspects’ scent but lost it in the derrick- covered countryside. The case grew cold, causing the Rangers and the Plainview policeman to reluctantly go their separate ways.
No one could have blamed Chief Murray for forgetting all about the unsolved homicide. Borger was miles out of his jurisdiction, and there was no shortage of cases for him to crack back home. But the coldblooded killing of a woman stuck in his craw, especially since he knew from experience that neither the Hutchinson County sheriff nor the Borger police department would do a thing to bring her murderer to justice.
Two months passed without a glimmer of hope. In fact, the hunt for the killers lost ground after the Borger cops misplaced the only hard evidence, the two bullets removed from the victim’s body. The dejected chief was on the verge of throwing in the towel, when a trusted informant tipped him off to the identity and whereabouts of the triggerman.
Murray jumped in his cruiser, drove like a demon to Borger and arrested Scotty Hyden in his hotel room. He dragged his handcuffed prisoner kicking and screaming to the city jail and handed over the well-known bank robber with the full knowledge “that the moment my back was turned he would buy himself out.”
The chief waited down the street to foil the staged “escape,” which would give him the legal grounds to take Hyden to a real jail that did not have a revolving door. Less than half an hour after the booking, Murray saw his former prisoner running down the street with two cops huffing and puffing in phony pursuit. They even fired a few rounds to make it look good, but the visiting lawman could not help but notice that every shot was aimed at the ground. Murray got his man for the second time that night and transported him to another county that did not have an open-door policy.
And that was how H.H. Murray earned the respect of the Texas Rangers. The Rangers lingered for another month in Borger before notifying the governor in early June 1927 that their presence was no longer required. The boomtown was now on the straight and narrow, and they were confident it would stay that way.
Manuel T. Gonzaullas, who achieved the distinction of being the first Texas Ranger with a Spanish surname, strongly disagreed with that optimistic assessment. On loan to the Bureau of Prohibition, Gonzaullas found out that lower-profile members of what he called the “conspiracy and ring” still held important positions in the city and county governments. He went on to predict that left to their own devices those individuals would reinstate the worst excesses of the wide-open period.
“Lone Wolf,” the nickname that made Gonzaullas famous, had it right. Those criminals, who stayed in town and waited out the Rangers, ended their law-abiding masquerade and sent word to departed colleagues that the coast was clear. In three short months, it was business as usual in bloody “Booger Town.”
In the absence of outside watchdogs, some backsliding was to be expected. That was why Moody was not alarmed by intermittent complaints from irate residents that vice and violence had returned to Borger. What town in Texas did not have backrooms where grown men could wet their whistles, place a bet or pay for the company of a willing woman?
When the Texas legislature created a new judicial district in the Panhandle in the fall of 1927, Moody picked an old classmate from his law school days at the University of Texas as district attorney. The governor warned Curtis Douglas up front that he had to be tough on the criminal element in Borger and made him swear he would stay on the wagon for the duration of his term. Douglas failed miserably and Borger backslid even more. The shamed DA submitted his resignation on September 13, 1928, and John A. Holmes, a force of an attorney was waiting in the wings, setting the wheels in motion for the a chapter in Texas oil history that reads like a pulp mystery novel.
It did not take long for all parties on both sides of the law to realize the new district attorney was cut from a radically different cloth. John A. Holmes had prior experience as a Panhandle prosecutor and for the past year had been in private practice in Borger. The forty-two-year old attorney was a devoted family man with a wife and a young daughter. Much more important than his biography were two established facts: the new DA could not be bought, and he was immune to intimidation.
Thinking Holmes was too good to be true, the cynical crime lords put his squeaky clean reputation to the test. To their surprise, he turned down every bribe. Hoping to scare him into playing along, they utilized a variety of threats including the oft-repeated prophecy that he would not live long enough to finish his term. Faced with an honest and fearless man with the power to do them harm, they marked him for death.
The assassination of John Holmes made front-page news throughout the state of Texas and across the country and remains one of the most shocking chapters in Texas oil history. Newspapers that normally buried Panhandle datelines in the back pages, if they gave them any ink at all, broke the shocking story with banner headlines: “Borger Prosecutor Shot And Killed,” Waxahachie Daily Light; “Police Seek Clue in Borger Killing,” Brownsville Herald; “Concealed Slayer Shoots Down District Attorney at Borger in His Yard,” WacoNews-Tribune.
The dedicated DA had worked late into the evening on September 13, 1929—the first anniversary of his appointment—preparing cases for presentation the next morning to a grand jury at Stinnett, the county seat. A few ticks after ten o’clock, he turned into the driveway of his stucco house and coasted into the one-car garage. Seconds later, he stepped out into the moonlight and closed the garage doors.
The lone assassin, who had waited patiently since sunset, took aim with a .38-caliber pistol from his hiding place in a clump of thick bushes. He fired five rounds in rapid succession, grazing Holmes’s chest with the first, penetrating his rib cage on the right side with the second and hitting him in the back of the neck with the third. A rush of adrenalin must have caused the gunman to miss completely on the fourth and fifth attempts, but it did not matter.
Jumping out of the bushes, the killer calmly checked the bullet-riddled body for signs of life. Finding none, he rifled through the pockets of the dead man’s coat for any incriminating papers until interrupted by the screams of the woman he had just turned into a widow. He scrambled over a fence and sprinted down the alley before anyone could get a good look at him.
Dan Moody reacted with cold fury to news of the murder of John Holmes, denouncing it as “a dastardly crime of a low-life assassin” and “one of the worst crimes ever committed in Texas.”
No less enraged was the federal judge who presided over the Panhandle. In a speech to Amarillo business leaders shortly after the slaying, Judge James C. Wilson said, “In my opinion, the murder of Johnny Holmes was the most serious crime in the history of Texas in 30 years, and I believe the hand that fired the shot either was the hand of an official or had official sanction.”
At the governor’s behest, Ranger captains Hamer and Hickman made a whirlwind return trip to the boomtown they thought they had tamed. It was clear to them after a couple of days in “Booger Town” the situation had deteriorated so much over the past two years that it was impossible to tell the Rangers had ever been there at all. In his written report to Moody, which was leaked to the press, Hamer contended Borger had “the worst bit of organized crime” he ever had seen.
In nearby Amarillo the Daily News chimed in with an editorial of its own that addressed the elephant in room: martial law. “While the gravity of the Borger situation, brought to a head by the murder of District Attorney Johnnie Holmes, is not to be minimized, there seems little justification for such a drastic measure as martial law.”
The editor then proceeded to contradict his caution against minimizing the wretched state of affairs: “Sending troops to Borger would give the city a black eye before the rest of the country that is undeserving. There have been numerous murders in Borger, and there have been ugly threats and allegations smacking of a conspiracy in lawlessness. But Borger’s history is largely the history of every other oil field city.”
The twisted logic of the Amarillo daily had been prompted by the September 25–26 visit of General Jacob F. Wolters, commander of the Texas National Guard. Before he placed Borger under martial law and sent in citizen-soldiers to occupy the town, Governor Moody wanted to see if Wolters was of the same mind.In a clandestine meeting at an undisclosed location in Austin, General Wolters reported his findings in person to the governor. He made the case for military intervention, but stopped short of advocating it.
“You have given me the facts, but you have not volunteered any recommendations,” an exasperated Moody said. “If you, having investigated the situation, were Governor of Texas, would you declare martial law?”
Backed into a corner, Wolters responded with a direct two-word answer: “I would.”
Dan Moody nodded in agreement and obvious relief. The matter was settled, and the decision was made. The governor gave the general three days to get all his ducks in a row. The Guard would leave for Borger on Sunday, September 29.
As per the governor’s instructions, preparations for the mobilization were made in strictest secrecy. For the mission, thirteen officers and eighty enlisted men, unmarried and with no dependents, were handpicked from the Guard units based in Dallas and Fort Worth. Dressed in civilian clothes, they were ordered to assemble at six o’clock Saturday evening at the Cow Town armory. The Guardsmen had no idea where they were going or why or for how long. Officers kept the men busy with drills until the midday mess. At two o’clock in the afternoon, a train with three Pullmans and a baggage car pulled onto the siding next to the armory.
With nothing but time on their hands, the Guardsmen speculated on their destination. The sun in their eyes meant the train was headed west. Those who kept up with the news said that had to mean Borger, where someone had gunned down a prosecutor.
In those days, newsmen made a habit of hanging around train stations. Sometimes it yielded a scoop, as it did late that sleepy Sunday for a cub reporter in Wichita Falls. When the westbound train chugged into the station, two curious things caught his eye. First, the passenger cars were full of clean-cut young men without a woman in sight. Second, every one of them stayed in his seat instead of hustling onto the platform for a pack of cigarettes or a snack like ordinary travelers.
The excited young journalist ran to the nearest pay phone and filed his story. In a matter of minutes, the wire services hummed with the breaking news that a trainload of National Guardsmen had been sighted on a westerly course for the Panhandle. Texas oil history now had its first true-blue, state-wide scandal.
In the capital, the press corralled the governor and gave him a chance to deny the report. When the interrogators refused to accept “no comment” for an answer, Moody conceded the cat was out of the bag with this good- natured quip: “Come around tomorrow, and I’ll show you the proclamation.” The train rolled into Amarillo at four o’clock in the morning on Monday the thirtieth of September. The officers and men rubbed the sleep from their eyes and filed into the Santa Fe station, where a hearty breakfast was waiting. They ate their fill, changed into their uniforms and climbed back on the train.
At half past eight, the National Guard express pulled into Borger. The Guardsmen had been on the ground for no more than a minute when a drunk staggered up to one of them. Without a word or a verbal order from his superiors, the soldier made the first arrest of the occupation.
That was exactly the kind of first impression Wolters wanted to make. The message was that the Guard meant business, and everyone who watched the unfortunate barfly be led away got it loud and clear.Like a well-oiled machine, the Guard shifted into high gear. City hall, police headquarters and the jail were under the complete control of the military by nine o’clock. Every official, from the mayor on down, was locked out of his office and physically removed from the premises. All members of the police force were relieved of duty, stripped of their badges and firearms and told to clear out.
On Tuesday, October 2, General Wolters named the nine members of the military Board of Inquiry, empowered to look under every rock for wrongdoers, first and foremost the party or parties responsible for the murder of DA Holmes. The board did not beat around the bush but went straight to work, questioning eleven city and county officials in a grueling fourteen-hour session.
The Rangers and the rank-and-file Guard were busy, too. On October 2, in “the beginning of the actual cleanup,” according to an Amarillo paper, “at least 36 saloons, blind tigers [speakeasies], gambling halls and houses of ill repute” were raided and presumably shut down. At the end of the following day, the number of raided establishments had risen to forty-five with one hundred persons of both sexes behind bars on a laundry list of charges.
A delegation of Borger’s “best,” citizens purporting to be upright pillars of the community, asked for a meeting with General Wolters on Saturday, October 5. They wanted to know what else had to happen for the state of martial law to be lifted.
Fortune. Corruption. Innovation. Murder.
and so much more.
You think you know the story of oil in Texas, but you’ve never heard it told like this.
This article was adapted from Texas Boomtowns: A History of Blood and Oil by Bartee Haile
Wolters’s answer was clear and to the point: “The resignation of the sheriff and all of his deputies, the resignation of the two constables and their deputies, the resignation of the mayor and the commission, and all members of the police department, and the replacement of these officers by men satisfactory to District Attorney Clem Calhoun.”
The general had laid his cards on the table, and now the marked men had to play the hand or fold. Most of the small fry dropped out almost immediately, turning in their resignations and quietly leaving town. But the bigger fish, like the mayor and sheriff, dug in their heels and refused to knuckle under.
The only thing holding up the mayor’s and the sheriff’s capitulation was their fear of prosecution for crimes committed while in office. Wolters gave them his word they were free to leave town as soon as he had their resignations on the table in front of him. Two minutes later, the last remaining obstacle to the end of martial law in Borger had been eliminated.
The mayor did not go quietly, however, and insisted upon playing the martyr to the bitter end. Repeating almost word for word the statement made by the state representative when he took his leave early in the occupation, the mayor whined, “Some man or men of necessity had to be the ‘scapegoat’ for the wrath of Dan Moody, and it so happened that I, among a few other officials, was chosen for the ordeal.”
Martial law officially came to an end on the afternoon of October 18, 1929, with the long-awaited departure of the National Guard. There was no parade or public celebration other than a collective sigh of relief from the remaining residents, who, for the first time in the history of the boomtown, had control of their community.
As for Ace Borger, the string-pulling town founder came out of the crackdown smelling like a rose. Acting as if nothing had happened, he went back to being Borger’s business leader and political power broker. “How do you run a man out of town when he owns most of it?” was the question that stumped Ace’s enemies. In the end, they had no choice but to tolerate his presence.
Everyone except Arthur Huey, the county tax collector, who hated Ace Borger with a passion only blood could quench. What evidently turned Huey’s loathing into homicidal rage was Borger’s refusal to bail the sticky- fingered taxman out of jail after his arrest on an embezzlement charge.
As part of his daily routine, Ace always went by the post office to pick up his mail. Huey knew that and was waiting from him on the last day of August 1934. Borger had his head down and was thumbing through the envelopes when he heard a familiar voice yell, “You son of a bitch, get your gun!”
Ace looked up to see Huey already had the drop on him. Before he could reach for his concealed pistol, the taxman fired two shots, hitting his nemesis in the body with both. Gravely wounded, Borger slumped to the floor, but his attacker kept on shooting until the smoking Colt .45 was empty. On the off chance his victim had a flicker of life left in him, the killer borrowed Ace’s .44 from under his coat and finished him off with four rounds from his own gun.
Standing over the dead man, Huey was heard to say, “Well, you SOB, I got you this time!”
At his murder trial that December, Arthur Huey’s lawyer tried his best to sell a plea of self-defense. To his surprise, as well as his client’s, the jury found in favor of the defendant and acquitted him of the cold-blooded, premeditated killing. The not-guilty verdict mirrored public opinion in a community where the majority felt in their bones that Ace Borger, the greedy genius behind the boomtown nightmare, had it coming.
The history of Borger was written not in oil but blood and measured in coffins instead of barrels. And while Borger never met the production of Spindletop or the repute of Beaumont, the story of Borger is a key part of Texas oil history — warts and all.
This story was adapted from a chapter of Texas Boomtowns: A History of Blood and Oil by Bartee Haile. For the full story, get the book — this crazy story only scratches the surface!
ABOUT THE BOOK:
On January 10, 1901, Beaumont awoke to the historic roar of the Spindletop gusher. A flood of frantic fortune seekers heard its call and quickly descended on the town. Over the next three decades, Texas’s first oil rush transformed the sparsely populated rural state practically beyond recognition. Brothels, bordellos and slums overran sleepy towns, and thick, black oil spilled over once-green pastures. While dreams came true for a precious few, most settled for high-risk, dangerous jobs in the oilfields and passed what spare time they had in the vice districts fueled by crude. From the violent shanties of Desdemona and Mexia to Borger and beyond, wildcat speculators, grifters and barons took the land for all it was worth. Author Bartee Haile explores the story of these wild and wooly boomtowns.
Ghost hunting is a national pastime, and historic Dallas has an abundance of spooks to keep supernatural seekers busy. And although the city is a relatively-young 170 years old, Dallas is jam-packed with the unexplained. With its confluence of settlers, cowboys, farmers, and native Indians, the small Texas town remained sleepy until the 20th century. Today, Dallas has dozens of haunted landmarks to delight and terrify.
The Stoneleigh Hotel has hosted many celebrities and a few ghosts. Image sourced from Haunted Dallas.
The Stoneleigh Hotel
What is it that makes hotels such great homes for ghosts? Dallas’s posh Stoneleigh has, despite an extensive $36 million renovation, not scared off its ghosts, who have been kicking back in the basement spa for years. The Beaux Arts style landmark, in the heart of Dallas’s Uptown District, is adorned with stone, terra cotta and brick, and marked the beginning of modern, luxury high-rise living in Dallas. While plenty of big shots like Frank Lloyd Wright, Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Carol Burnett, Paul Simon and Oliver Stone have stayed there, its the permanent resident spirits who are the real stars.
The Lizard Lounge, once known as the Grand Crystal Palace Theatre, located in Dallas’s Deep Ellum district, is today a popular hipster watering hole. Built as a warehouse in 1899, it was later converted to the Grand Crystal Palace Theatre. Local legend has it that workers were killed during the construction of the warehouse. Is the mystery man in a dark suit, cape and hat seen in the audience seating area a ghost from its period as a theater? And what about the stories of light bulbs exploding, and the cold dressing room? Today, bar patrons note feeling the presence of something unexplainable. Bar-fly ghosts?
Preston Road in north Dallas was a pre-Columbian trade route, and the Shawnee Indians used it for decades before colonizers arrived. Later, cattlemen took advantage of the trail to drive their herds to Kansas. Today it’s a high traffic street in the center of Dallas, where drivers have seen ghostly figures on the side of the road after dark, with some spirits dressed in pioneer clothes.
The Sixth Floor museum. Image sourced from Haunted Dallas.
Oswald’s Ghost
Modern Dallas is haunted in a more tragic way than mere ghosts. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was killed while riding in an open-top limousine through downtown Dallas. His assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot from the sixth floor of the adjacent Texas School Book Depository. Constructed in 1901, the red brick building housed a private company that stocked and distributed textbooks until 1970. The City of Dallas acquired the building in 1977, renovated it, leaving the top two floors of the building, including the infamous sixth floor, unoccupied; and in 1989, the Sixth Floor Museum opened. Visitors have seen a shadowy figure roaming the exhibit, sometimes out of the corners of their eyes; and experienced cold spots near Oswald’s perch. Perhaps the assassin has returned..?
A brief history of one of the most confusing events in the presidential election
All politics is local, as they say, and nowhere is that truer than Iowa. Before any candidate can hope to win the highest office in the land, first they must make it past Iowa. As the kick-off to any presidential primary season, the Iowa Caucus commands national attention for both its place and its curious history and customs.
Why Iowa?
Iowa is known for “retail politics,” a process in which candidates engage with voters face to face and person to person. Unlike most states, Iowa features intimate gatherings, direct interactions, and awkward moments as the candidates meet with voters, take questions, and introduce themselves to the citizens who will determine their fate.
Over the course of many months, the campaigns directly engage voters, and many voters test the waters by taking the opportunity to see multiple candidates multiple times. It may surprise many non-Iowans to learn that more than 1,600 precinct caucuses take place across the state for each party on caucus night. With more than 3,000 party meetings taking place in a state with approximately three million people, the first thing to know is that the process is intensely local.
Courtesy of the Harkin Collection, Drake University Archives and Special Collections.
Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign for the presidency was a turning point for Iowa. Though Iowa had been first in the nation in 1972, Carter invested significant time in small-group campaigning, believing that a come-from-behind win in Iowa could provide the momentum to elevate his viability nationally. He beat all other candidates, and his tactics have become the model for all subsequent campaigns.
Intro to Caucusing
Some caucuses have hundreds of attendees, while others will have a handful of people joining together in someone’s living room, a public library, or the local elementary school. At each one of those caucuses, community members will stand up to speak on behalf of each campaign, which elevates the citizen activist to a particularly important role in Iowa. Every campaign seeks to find more than 1,600 dedicated volunteers to articulate the candidate’s message and serve as an effective advocate.
To be a viable contender in the Iowa caucuses, a candidate must connect directly with average voters in the hopes of attracting a strong grassroots base of supporters who can propel the campaign to victory on caucus night. Doing so requires a substantial commitment of time shaking hands and answering questions, seeking any opportunity to speak directly to voters.
Following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, seen here at a 2007 event at Drake University, was the prohibitive front-runner for the Republican Party nomination in 2008 to follow the presidency of George W. Bush. His liberal views on issues such as abortion did not endear him to Iowa’s social conservatives, and he attracted just four percent of the vote in the caucuses on January 3, 2008. (Author’s collection.)
Some have characterized this process as being peculiar and parochial (at best) or undemocratic (at worst). Some argue that the state’s agricultural interests and predominantly white population make it a poor choice to perform such an important function, as it does not accurately reflect the makeup of the country.
And some say that the rules and procedures that govern the caucuses, particularly for the Democratic Party, are outdated, arcane, or confusing. Nonetheless, and despite continual calls to change the process, Iowa continues to maintain its first-in-the-nation status. One justification for allowing Iowa to lead the party-nomination process is that retail politics permits all candidates to compete on a level playing field. The Iowa caucuses are not about name recognition and campaign spending. Here, candidates succeed by meeting real people, listening to real concerns, and answering real questions.
Sen. Barack Obama addresses a group of Iowa voters at North High School in Des Moines in 2007. A first-term senator who was virtually unknown until his 2004 Democratic National Convention address, Obama was considered a long shot for the Democratic nomination. His 2008 caucus-night victory propelled him to the presidency. Courtesy of Jordan Oster.
Real people, real politics
To introduce themselves to Iowa voters and community leaders, candidates frequently visit local businesses for closed events with managers and employees. Bill Clinton, former governor of Arkansas, meets a voter at a feed store. With Iowa senator Tom Harkin in the race in 1992, Clinton did not mount a significant campaign, but he returned prior to his 1996 reelection effort.
Courtesy of the Harkin Collection, Drake University Archives and Special Collections.
Local restaurants often host presidential candidates who stop by to shake hands and introduce themselves to voters. Diners are so frequently interrupted by journalists during the Iowa Caucus and leading up to it that one company printed special T-shirts for visiting journalists in 2015, one of which reads, “Sorry to interrupt your meal, but are you alive and have an opinion on the upcoming election?”
Mitt Romney, pictured here at a West Des Moines restaurant with his wife, Ann, was bested twice in the Iowa caucus (by Mike Huckabee in 2008 and by Rick Santorum in 2012) but became the Republican nominee in 2012.
Courtesy of Jordan Oster.
Rituals of the Iowa Caucus
Like any state, Iowa has its fair share of eccentricities. The rituals of the Iowa caucuses serve as a means to connect candidates and voters in unique ways Since 1972, candidates have learned the habits of Iowa voters: coffee bean polls at the Hamburg Inn No. 2, sundaes at the Ice Cream Palace in LeMars, and pork chops on a stick. For those who would be president, Iowa offers a host of culinary treats alongside hands to shake.
Among the traditions of Iowa is the 99-county tour, a venture following in the footsteps of longtime Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley’s annual trek. Rick Santorum, winner of the 2012 caucuses, was the first to complete the tour in 2015, reflecting on the exercise by saying, “You get a chance to sit around and talk to real people.” He continued, “You meet people, and you connect with folks like we have here in Lyon County, and then you recruit other folks to be your caucus chairs, to recruit other folks to speak for you in the caucuses.”
From 1979 until 2011, the Republican Party of Iowa held the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames. But the tradition of straw polls at community events around the state has had a long history, as seen in this 1962 photograph. Straw polls, or informal preference votes, were often sponsored by local newspapers.
When systemic racism tried to stop them, South Bend residents built a “nice neighborhood” for themselves.
You may have heard that South Bend’s mayor is running for president. With Mayor Pete in the news, the city’s past is getting lots of attention. Pete Buttigieg’s record on racial issues has been criticized, but South Bend has some bright spots too—even if they come from an earlier and often overlooked era.
During the 1950s, South Bend (and most cities in America)
featured a harsh environment of discrimination and exclusion for its African
American residents. One way this occurred was through real estate and lending
policies that made it hard for those residents to buy nice homes in mostly white
neighborhoods.
But on a Sunday afternoon—May 21, 1950—a group of South Bend
locals came together to work on making their dream become reality. Many of them
were associated with the local Studebaker factory. They formed a nonprofit and
called it The Better Homes, a title that summed up the group’s endeavor. Its
members desired nothing more than to own their own homes “in a nice
neighborhood,” as one of them characterized it. The name echoed the popular
book Better Homes at Lower Cost and
the Better Homes and Gardens
magazine.
That Sunday meeting was a secret. The group’s attorney, J. Chester Allen, wanted them to move quickly and secure the site before anyone was alerted to African Americans moving into a hitherto white neighborhood. He stressed the importance of acting as a corporation, which would give them a better chance at success than if they were just a group of individual families.
They knew it would be a struggle. As the Reverend Buford
Gordon had written in his 1922 book The
Negro in South Bend, “There are people who think that the Negro is in the
same environment that the white man is, since they are living side by side in a
city. They are not.”
Better Homes bought the land to build new houses, at first in
the North Elmer Street area, but the white residents did not like the prospect
of a group of African Americans moving into their neighborhood. This, at least,
is the assessment of Nola Allen, who heard about the difficulties from her
mother. In Nola’s opinion, “Getting the land was the easiest part, but after
that nothing was easy. Nobody wanted them to build on that land.”
They ran into problems finding a good contractor. One
popular company was known to build nice homes for white families on the south
side of Western Avenue and cheaper ones for African Americans on the north. They
ran into problems connecting to South Bend’s sewer system.
They ran into problems finding financing. In November 1951,
Lureatha Allen at last could report to Better Homes that permanent financing
had been secured under 203, the HUD Basic Home Mortgage Loan 203 (b).
But they worked together, using a co-op model, the few legal
protections available to them, and a lot of hard work and community spirit. Slowly
the houses were built.
This view of the 1700 block of North Elmer Street in 2015 shows (from left) the former homes of Earl and Viro Thompson, Gus and Josie Watkins and Bland and Rosa Jackson. Image sourced from Better Homes of South Bend: An American Story of Courage, courtesy of Peter Ringenberg, photographer.
Leroy and Margaret Cobb, to take one example, moved into
1702 North Elmer Street on Saturday, November 1, 1953, over three years after
that first secret meeting of Better Homes. The date is etched in Leroy’s mind.
“I was elated.”
They now had plenty of space for their growing family. Their third child was to be born in a couple months. And here Leroy was, only twenty-three years old, and he owned his own brand-new home in a nice neighborhood. He often thought of others in their group who, although much older, had never had a home of their own before this. His grandmother on his mother’s side often told him: “You don’t know how fortunate you are. I’ve never owned a home.”
When you think of Texas in the 19th century, you undoubtedly picture cowboys, Native Indians, and colorful immigrants all fighting for survival on the wild Texas frontier. Joining their ranks is the iconic, oil-crazy wildcatter, who burst forward into the public conscious in the 20th century. After decades of acknowledging that crude oil was hiding underground, only occasionally bubbling up, but not having a great need for it, Texans saw the black gold explode onto the Texas landscape at the close of the 19th century.
On January 10, 1901, the first major oil well came in at Spindletop down the road from Houston, south of Beaumont, marking the birth of the oil industry in Texas. The original Texas boomtown, this Beaumont home to the salt dome produced 100,000 barrels per day and instantly made Texas the major player in the modern petroleum industry.
Standing room only at a well somewhere in southeast Texas. Image sourced from Texas Boomtowns: A History of Blood and Oil, courtesy of San Jacinto Museum, MSS0200-227, Houston Public Library, HMRC.
When future Texaco Oil founder Joe Cullinan heard the news, he was already raking in money from oil under the salt domes around the central Texas town of Corsicana. Their major oil discovery a few years earlier would be dwarfed by the strike in the southeast corner of the state.
Spindletop produced or enlarged companies such as Gulf Oil, Texaco and Humble, and storage facilities, refineries and oil field equipment companies grew quickly in nearby communities to take advantage of the prosperous oilfield. In fact, Houston would not be the Energy Capital of the World without the industry-shattering strike at Spindletop.
Desdemona was a busy place during the Eastland County boom. Image sourced from Texas Boomtowns: A History of Blood and Oil, courtesy of DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Texas Postcards Collection.
Once Spidletop stopped gushing oil, the tent cities, con artists, chiselers, and prostitutes split. Beaumont got a lot less crowded, but still had a population double its pre-boom size. Now, oil derricks populated every corner of Texas, and new boomtowns exploded west of Fort Worth in 1918 and in Mexia, 100 miles south of Fort Worth, in 1913. In some cases, small communities like Desdemona benefited when at the town banded together hoping to strike it big. There was an anything-goes wildness to the day for Texans in oil country. Sadly, after all the oil was sucked up, many of these boomtowns went bust, leaving little or nothing behind.
Derricks and an expensive touring car, a symbol of oil prosperity at Ranger. Image sourced from Texas Boomtowns: A History of Blood and Oil, courtesy of DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Texas Postcards Collection.
With the arrival of the automobile, oil now had a market, which would drive all sorts of research into the technology needed to find it and extract it. And newer uses for oil and petroleum-based projects kept the wild speculation going, speculation that still drives the oil industry in Texas and beyond.
