Cable Tool Rig

Breckenridge was a quiet trading center until 1920. The Handbook of Texas says drilling began in the field in 1918 but the boom started in 1920, when thousands of workers and speculators put up tents and shacks and the population rose from about 1,500 in January to 30,000 within a year. More than 200 wells were drilled inside the city limits. In one year the field produced 15 percent of all American oil and a third of Texas's. This replica stands inside Six Flags Over Texas, so seeing it means entering the park.

What the plaque says

Cable Tool Rig Drilled the early deep oil wells in Texas. Derrick here is exact replica and has same rigging and tools used in 1920 to drill the Crowley No. 1, a 250-barrel producer at 3500 feet--one of deepest wells up to the time. It was near Breckenridge, in one of great fields in oil empire of Texas. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 11 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 15 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 15 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 16 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.

More markers nearby

• Narrow Gauge Railway — steps away
• Ford Cemetery — 1.9 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Arlington — 2.5 mi
• P.A. Watson Log House — 2.6 mi