First Gas Well in the Panhandle of Texas

The well came out of a survey paid for at home. In 1916 the Amarillo Oil Company, a locally funded venture, hired Charles N. Gould to examine the Amarillo fold. He and Robert S. Dewey mapped a structure ten to fifteen miles across with 400 feet of uplift and named it for John Ray Butte, and the company leased 64,000 acres. Three more wells followed in 1919, and in March 1920 the four tested at 160 million cubic feet a day. Oilmen still doubted a gas field with no market and no pipelines.

What the plaque says

First Gas Well in the Panhandle of Texas The discovery well in the vast Panhandle-Hugoton Gas Field, largest known gas field in the world, is located one mile east of this point on the east slope of John Ray Butte. The geological structure was discovered by Dr. Charles N. Gould in 1905 while in the employ of the United States Geological Survey, and the well was located by him in 1917. This well, the Hapgood, Masterson No. 1, was started December 1, 1917, and completed at a cost of $70,000 as a gas well December 7, 1918, at a depth of 2605 feet. It produced about 5,000,000 cubic feet of gas per day. This discovery initiated the development of this great gas field and of the Panhandle oil fields. The gas field now extends 275 miles from the Texas Panhandle north into Kansas, with a width in places of more than 90 miles. Pipelines from this field transmit gas to Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, and to most of the cities and towns of the mid-west. Lines also carry gas to Los Angeles and to other cities and towns on the west coast. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 14 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
• Old Tascosa and the Julian Bivins Museum — 17 mi
  The 1884 stone courthouse of the Canadian River cowtown, later a ranch headquarters and the first home of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, now a museum on the working campus.
• Window on the Plains Museum — 19 mi
  Moore County's free museum on the Dumas highway, telling an industrial Panhandle of zinc smelters, helium and gas plants alongside the farm and ranch rooms.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 21 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.

More markers nearby

• Masterson — 4.2 mi
• First Cemetery in Potter County — 7.6 mi
• The Canadian River — 7.7 mi
• Great Spanish Road, First Ranch in Potter County, First Store in Potter County — 7.7 mi