City of Wortham

Before the boom Wortham was a small market town. The Handbook of Texas gives it about thirty inhabitants in 1885, rapid growth in the 1890s, and by 1914 a cottonseed oil mill, three gins, two banks and 950 people. Fairfield beat Wortham in the 1891 county-seat election. The boom raised the population to some 30,000 in 1925, and by 1929 it had fallen to about 2,000. Businesses then dropped from seventy-two in 1931 to fifty in 1936. The Wortham Schools plaque puts the peak at 20,000, so the boom's size depends on who counted.

What the plaque says

City of Wortham Situated on grant given 1834 by Mexico to Robert B. Longbotham (1797-1883), a Texas colonist from England who settled here in 1839. Years later, in 1871, when Houston & Texas Central Railway was planned through the area, R. B. Longbotham sold right of way through his land for token sum of $5, and townsite was bought from him by investors. Although town was platted as "Tehuacana", post office was established Nov. 10, 1871, as Long Bottom, for original landowner. In 1874 name again changed, to honor Col. Luther Rice Wortham, a merchant instrumental in securing railway for area. Wortham was incorporated in 1910, but remained a modest market town until the 1920s, when rumors of oil attracted such prospectors as hotel man Conrad Hilton, who soon left when wells yielded salt water. A Thanksgiving Day gusher in 1924 opened the boom. Population leaped from 1,000 to over 30,000 at once. Law enforcement was impossible, housing inadequate, but in time the town met its obligations. Churches and schools prospered. The municipal band was the official band of 1926 United Confederate Verterans' Convention in Birmingham, Ala. Intensive drilling had ended the boom by late 1927. In 1972 a few wells are still pumping, and new horizons are being explored. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 0.8 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 12 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Old Fort Parker — 16 mi
  A rebuilt 1830s family stockade near the Navasota River, where a May 1836 attack killed men of the Parker settlement and took five captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.
• Petroleum Industry Park — 21 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.

More markers nearby

• The Wortham Oil Boom — steps away
• Wortham Schools — steps away
• Blind Lemon Jefferson — 0.7 mi
• Mrs. Lucy Haggard Longbotham — 0.7 mi