Gulf Burnett No. 2 (Carson County Oil Discovery Well)

The well had a promoter. After gas came in on the Masterson ranch in December 1918, the Groom grain dealer Eugene S. Blasdel bought Grover C. Bishop's interest in an expiring oil and gas lease on Burk Burnett's Four Sixes land, took W. H. Fuqua and Pat H. Landergin as partners, hired the geologist Charles N. Gould to locate the wells and brought in Gulf Production to drill. Gulf No. 1 Burnett began producing fifty million cubic feet of gas a day in 1920. When No. 2 struck oil in 1921, Blasdel named his newborn son James Gulf.

What the plaque says

Gulf Burnett No. 2 (Carson County Oil Discovery Well) (1 mile southeast) The Panhandle's first oil well, Gulf Burnett No. 2, was struck by the Gulf Production Company on May 2, 1921, on the 6666 Ranch of S. B. Burnett. The prediction of oil in this area by U.S. geologists in 1904 and the discovery of natural gas nearby in 1918 induced Amarillo businessmen to finance Burnett No. 2. Though the first oil was of poor quality, major oil discoveries in the nearby Borger and South Pampa fields in 1926 spurred a regional oil boom and established the Panhandle as one of Texas' richest petroleum areas. Carson County has produced 150 million barrels of oil since 1921. (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

• First Rotary Drilling Rig Used in Texas Panhandle — 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