The Wortham Oil Boom

The boom is best recorded in a third-grade classroom. According to the district history, the Monday after the rush began, a teacher enrolled 66 children in a third grade that already held 18, making a class of 84. Desks seated 24, so children shared them two or three to a desk and the rest sat on wooden crates from downtown merchants. There were no textbooks, so work was written on the board. The pupils came from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and New Mexico. Some east-side parents, wary of the crowds, had their children taught in a private home instead.

What the plaque says

The Wortham Oil Boom The city of Wortham rejected a well drilled by C. L. Witherspoon in 1912 when it produced gas, not water. However, oil and gas wells in 1919-23 gave prosperity to neighbors north and south, and petroleum exploration began here. Discovery well for the Wortham Field, Roy Simmons No. 1 (1 mi. S), came in as a gusher on Nov. 27, 1924. Within three weeks over 300 drilling rigs were in the field. 3,509,768 barrels of oil were produced in Jan. 1925; total for the year was 16,838,150 barrels. Wasteful drilling slowed yield to 3,000 barrels a day by Sept. 1927, and the boom was concluded. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 0.8 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 12 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Old Fort Parker — 16 mi
  A rebuilt 1830s family stockade near the Navasota River, where a May 1836 attack killed men of the Parker settlement and took five captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.
• Petroleum Industry Park — 21 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.

More markers nearby

• City of Wortham — steps away
• Wortham Schools — steps away
• Blind Lemon Jefferson — 0.7 mi
• Mrs. Lucy Haggard Longbotham — 0.7 mi