Fowler Discovery Well

It was a neighborhood venture. Friends, neighbors and local businesses each put in $100 to $500 or supplies, agreeing to form the Fowler Farm Oil Company if it hit, and Walter Cline supplied a rig and crew for a $1,000 interest. The well came in from 1,735 feet. Three weeks later fifty-six rigs were drilling inside Burkburnett, crude had risen to $1.93 a barrel and a town-lot lease could cost $1,000. The investors sold out to Magnolia for $1.8 million in cash, and the Texas Company laid a four-inch line to carry 5,000 to 6,000 barrels a day.

What the plaque says

(400 yards north) In 1918, cotton farmers Shields and Cassie Fowler considered leaving their land due to oppressive drought conditions. Aware of small but successful oil finds in the area, however, Cassie suggested they drill a well on their land. With help from family, friends and local business owners, they began drilling near their hog pen, and the Fowler Discovery Well blew in on July 26. The largest producing well in the town to that point, it yielded about 2,500 barrels a day once contained. The well tapped the vast Townsite Pool and triggered four years of boomtown growth for Burkburnett. The area soon had close to 3,000 wells and several refineries. (2005)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 14 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Kell House Museum — 14 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 26 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 29 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.

More markers nearby

• First National Bank of Burkburnett — 0.5 mi
• John Gerham Hardin — 1.1 mi
• Samuel Burk Burnett — 1.2 mi
• The Red River — 1.4 mi