Ector County's First Dry Hole

The potash the geologists hoped for was real. The Permian Basin takes its name from rocks laid down when the region sank beneath the Permian sea, which left one of the thickest Permian deposits anywhere. As that sea retreated it became a landlocked basin where evaporation outran inflow, and thick evaporites formed, among them potash, a critical material in World War I that had come from Germany. Johan August Udden's work led the U.S. Geological Survey to search here. The first commercial deposit was found in New Mexico in 1925, and Texas deposits went undeveloped.

What the plaque says

Ector County's First Dry Hole Drilled in 1924 near this site. Geologists were forecasting oil and urgently-needed potash, but Pennsylvania experts (using a chilled shop core drill) gave up the well at 900 feet, on "Red Bed" Rock--A substance new to them. Loss in this and a second drilling was $150.000. In 1927 a well was brought in just west of Odessa, and in a few years oil was found within yards of the first dry hole. By 1964 Ector County had 9,600 oil and 22 gas wells. However, the U.S. average is 8 dry holes out of 9 wells such as that drilled here in 1924. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 1.7 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 9.5 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 11 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 17 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Site of Homestead of William C. Sublett — 0.4 mi
• Site of Blackshear High School — 1.3 mi
• Ector County Newspapers — 1.5 mi
• St. Joseph Catholic Church — 1.6 mi