First Rotary Drilling Rig Used in Texas Panhandle

Two years after Gulf's Burnett well found oil, the Panhandle still had no way to move it. Until mid-1923 oil from Carson and Hutchinson counties came up by pump for use in the field only, and the discovery well had been shut in after 1,000 barrels for want of storage or a route to refineries. On June 1, 1923, the Sanford No. 1 J. C. Whittington in southwestern Hutchinson County found flowing oil at 3,077 feet. That October the rotary rig came here, and by June 1926 pipelines of eight companies carried Panhandle crude out.

What the plaque says

First Rotary Drilling Rig Used in Texas Panhandle In October 1923, W. T. Willis, J. E. Trigg, and H. D. Lewis, partners in one of Texas' largest drilling firms, broke ground at the S. B. Burnett 6666 Ranch with the first rotary drilling rig used in the Texas Panhandle. Success of this drilling method was a major event in this region. Drilling equipment included a $25,000 rotary rig; a 6-inch diameter drill pipe; a derrick; 3 steam boilers; 2 mud pumps; and other tools. Rotary rigs began to replace cable tool rigs on the Texas Gulf Coast about 1900, but the lack of a rotary drill bit capable of piercing rock delayed its use here. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hutchinson County Museum — 4.9 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 11 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.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 17 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.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 18 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.

More markers nearby

• Gulf Burnett No. 2 (Carson County Oil Discovery Well) — steps away
• Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail — 3.6 mi
• Beale Road — 3.6 mi
• Site of John and Maggie Weatherly Half-Dugout Site — 3.7 mi