Ibex

The town took its name from the Ibex Oil Company of Colorado, whose Caddo lime well started the boom. The Handbook of Texas puts Ed Landreth's refinery at $300,000 and says thousands of oil workers and their families crowded in during 1921 and 1922. Besides the stores and hotels, Ibex had a drugstore, a meat market, a dance hall and a four-room schoolhouse that served as meeting hall and church. In 1925 a fire spread to eight storage tanks holding 5,000 gallons of gasoline each. When production slowed the town emptied: forty-eight people in 1948, twenty-five by 1960.

What the plaque says

Oil drilling in the 1920s transformed this area from cattle ranches to a boomtown. In 1919, the Ibex Oil Co. drilled a successful well into the Caddo Lime formation. Soon other drilling companies came and wooden derricks spread for miles. In 1921, Ibex sold their leases to the Landreth Co. Ed Landreth built a gasoline refinery, water-powered by a dam on Hubbard Creek. Lone Star Gas, Humble Oil and other companies built facilities and dozens of employee homes. Other families slept in tents or open pastures. In the 1920s, the Ibex community had a school, grocery, dry goods, hotels, cafes, and a central phone office. The post office operated from 1923-53 before the population fell. Today, foundations and smokestacks remain from the industrial past of Ibex. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Jail Art Center — 9.9 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 17 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 22 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 27 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.

More markers nearby

• Moran — 9.5 mi
• Lt. Col. William E. Dyess — 9.9 mi
• Robert Edward Nail, Jr. — 10.0 mi
• Dr. Jack Shackelford — 10.0 mi