The New Deal Era in Kilgore

The Living New Deal project lists the Works Progress Administration as the agency behind Kilgore's City Park, begun in 1934 and finished about 1936. Its photographs show a rock wall with steps, three bridges, a wall beside a drainage ditch, and steps with bench seats partway up the slope. TXGenWeb's list of Gregg County landmarks adds that the Kilgore College Administration Building, another New Deal project in the same years, was completed in 1936 after the junior college was approved in 1935.

What the plaque says

The New Deal Era in Kilgore After the discovery of oil here in the 1930s, this site was transformed into a makeshift tent city by thousands of people displaced by a deepening national depression. In an effort to control growth, city officials chose this site as the focus of an ambitious public works program in 1934. The park project, which included extensive rock work, was influenced by the planning and foresight of other Federal "New Deal" projects underway in Kilgore at the time (Kilgore Public Library and Kilgore College Administration Building). The park project was finished about 1936. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• East Texas Oil Museum — 0.5 mi
  A Kilgore College museum that rebuilds the 1930s oil boom in a full-scale Boomtown with a general store, drugstore and newspaper office, plus dioramas, films and antiques given by East Texans.
• New London Museum and Cenotaph — 11 mi
  A volunteer-run museum beside the pink granite cenotaph for the March 1937 school gas explosion, holding a model of the school, a blackboard from that day and an odorizer device.
• Camp Ford Historic Park — 23 mi
  A free county park north of Tyler on the site of the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi, with a kiosk, an interpretive trail and a historical society museum downtown.
• Tyler State Park — 25 mi
  A 985-acre park eight miles north of Tyler, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from 1935 to 1941 around a 64-acre spring-fed lake, with more than 13 miles of trails.

More markers nearby

• Site of Alexander Institute — 0.2 mi
• World's Richest Acre — 0.4 mi
• The Kilgore I&GN-Missouri Pacific Railroad Station — 0.4 mi
• Lou Della Crim Home — 0.5 mi