![]() Enterprising restaurateurs built fires under 6-foot vats, filled them with water and dried beans, and charged oil hands 15 cents for a cup of “soup.” Gas hung in the air for miles around an oil town. Managers of flimsy boarding houses along the dirt ruts of "Main Street" charged exhausted riggers almost half a day’s pay to rent a cot for twelve hours. ![]() Sometimes no town existed at all near a newly-tapped oil field, so corrugated iron shanty towns popped up quickly to serve the thousands of people streaming in. Rough was the right word for life in a boomtown. Once they learned to sling heavy cables and pipes on the derrick floor, the farmers became oilmen and graduated to roughneck status. Thousands of inexperienced farmers, called boll weevils by seasoned oil workers, left their tractors and poured into boomtowns. But with significant oil strikes in Corsicana in 1894 and Spindletop’s explosion in 1901, independent oil contractors called wildcatters soon stalked the Texas frontier looking for big bucks and big opportunities in the bubbling ground. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil Company of Pennsylvania had an unchallenged monopoly on America’s oil and gas supply. Oil wasn’t news to the titans of industry in the big cities of the northeast. These were only a few of the Texas boomtowns where oil derricks crowded the landscape and wildcatters, boll weevils, and roughnecks slogged through the muddy streets dreaming of black gold wealth. Corsicana, Borger, Wink, Ranger, Brownwood, Humble, Wichita Falls, Mexia, Beaumont, Luling, Kilgore, Longview, Desdemona.
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