The Cable Tool Rig

Finding the basin's oil took new methods. The first commercial well, the Westbrook field discovery in Mitchell County, was completed in 1921 at 2,498 feet. By 1923 geologists pictured the basin as an elliptical bowl deepest in the middle, and with few outcrops inside it they hunted surface anticlines around its edges, finding the World, McCamey and Yates fields. The Hobbs field of 1928 was the first found after magnetometer and torsion-balance surveys, and the seismograph took over from there. In 1930 Lon D. Cartwright mapped the buried high in the middle, the Central Basin Platform.

What the plaque says

The Cable Tool Rig Equipment that replaced the spring pole drilling method used in America's earlier oil fields. The Cable Tool Rig used a bit suspended on a steel drilling cable. The bit is dropped in the hole and the impact breaks up the formation. The broken pieces are removed by a bail. This method made possible the deeper penetration so necessary in the southwest. The Cable Tool Rig was introduced in Texas in 1866. (some use of Cable Tools had been made around 1840 in the north.) Texas gave the southwestern oil industry the first lease, the first oil pipe line, the first wooden and iron storage tanks, the first iron drums for transporting crude oil and first use of the augur principle later employed in rotary rigs. The Cable Tool Rig brought in the first important wells of the permian basin. This Rig was reconstructed from parts of several Rig was reconstructed from parts of several rigs actually used at big lake, Regan county, where the No. 1 Santa Rita blew in during may 1923 as the first well in the first major oil field in the permian basin. To the cable tool rig and the men who used it goes credit for the great development in the permian basin. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 3.3 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 10 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 11 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 19 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• El Paso Natural Gas Company's First Compressor Transmission Engine — steps away
• Permian Basin — steps away
• Prairie Dog — 0.8 mi
• Site of Odessa College — 1.4 mi