Cook Ranch Oil Field

The oil money went to Fort Worth. Within five months of the 1926 discovery, Missouri Matilda Nail Cook set up the W. I. Cook Memorial Trust in memory of her husband William Ivy Cook and their daughter Jesse. She gave it $300,000, then all of her oil royalties until another $300,000 had accumulated and half of them afterward. The hospital on West Lancaster opened January 29, 1929, with 55 beds. In 1952, during the polio epidemic, trustees turned it over to children and renamed it Cook Children's Hospital, which merged with another children's hospital in 1985.

What the plaque says

Cook Ranch Oil Field William Ivy Cook (1857-1923) and his wife Matilda moved to this county in 1985. With a brother-in-law, J. H. Nail, Cook purchased a 27.75-section ranch. The Cooks bought out Nail in 1898, and have owned the ranch ever since. During the 1918 Breckenridge and Ranger booms, Cook sold leases but prophesied he could drink from his hat all of the oil under his land. In 1925 his widow leased all open acreage to Charles Roeser, Tol Pendleton, and Marshall R. Yount, of Roeser & Pendleton, Inc. This firm's second well in 1926 struck oil at 1241 feet and flowed at 1000 barrels a day. This prolific flow of oil at such a shallow depth has been one of Cook Ranch field's remarkable features. Commercial low pressure gas injection was started on the ranch in 1927 and helped elevate recovery standards internationally. With the oil wealth, Mrs. Cook founded the W. I. Cook Memorial Hospital in Fort Worth in 1929. Cook field enriched Albany and its trade area by expanding petroleum-related business activities. Of the 1087 wells drilled on the ranch, 825 yielded oil and four gas. Production has now exceeded thirty million barrels. Marshall R. Young remains owner of the oil firm. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Jail Art Center — 0.5 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 15 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 23 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 29 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.

More markers nearby

• Shackelford County — steps away
• Robert Edward Nail, Jr. — 0.4 mi
• Hartfield Building — 0.4 mi
• Shackelford County — 0.4 mi