Moonshine Hill

Charles F. Barrett took his lease in 1903, began drilling in March 1904 and found oil that May. The community was probably named for the Moonshine Air Jammer Company pumping station near the first well to produce commercially, brought in on December 12, 1904, and the first gusher blew in on January 9, 1905. By March 1905 thirty-one wells were producing an estimated 87,775 barrels a day, and by 1909 Moonshine Hill, with six or eight saloons, a dance hall and a union church, was larger than Humble. A Humble post office branch opened there on June 8, 1916.

What the plaque says

Moonshine Hill Early reports of natural gas seepages in this area were not uncommon in the late 19th century. James Slaughter noticed such natural occurences near the San Jacinto River in 1887. Several years later, with S. A. Hart, he set up a drilling operation in the area, but it proved unsuccessful. Charles Barrett, a former Huston merchant, also drilled wells here, but found the results limited. In 1904, the Higgins Oil Company brought in a major gas well and the following year, the first successful oil well was drilled. This area, known as the Moonshine Hill section of the great Humble oil field, became the site of a boom town. Within months of the 1905 discovery, the population of the Moonshine Hill settlement increased to 10,000. Early operations associated with the site included the Moonshine Oil Company of Walter Sharp, Ed Prather, and Howard R. Hughes. Although tents comprised most of the early structures, Moonshine Hill eventually included a church, school, postal station, stores, hotels, and saloons. Despite three separate boom eras, the last occurring in 1929, Moonshine Hill declined as a community. Its brief existence, however, had a dramatic impact on the economic development of Humble and Houston. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 19 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 20 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Emancipation Park — 20 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 20 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• First United Methodist Church of Humble — 1.5 mi
• Humble Lodge No. 979, A.F. & A.M. — 1.9 mi
• City of Humble — 2.0 mi
• Humphrey and Sarah Merriman Jackson — 12 mi