Tinsley Oil Field

The discovery began with a search for clay. Geologist Frederic Mellen, 28, was running a WPA minerals survey in Yazoo County, hunting material for children's cereal bowls, when he found a rock layer about 250 feet higher than expected. Union Producing Company then drilled the G.C. Woodruff No. 1 on a family farm, and on September 5, 1939, it flowed about 235 barrels a day from 4,560 feet. Within 35 days lease and purchase deals topped $5 million. Carbon dioxide injection later kept the field making about 6,000 barrels a day in 2017.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blue Front Cafe — 4.6 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
• Triangle Cultural Center — 10 mi
  A 1904 school on Main Street in Yazoo City that survived the great fire of that May and now holds the county's historical museum, in a town rebuilt in brick on the same lots.
• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 24 mi
  The stretch of the Natchez Trace around Ridgeland, where a worn section of the Old Trace, the Ross Barnett Reservoir and the Choctaw town of Chisha Foka share a few miles of parkway.
• Delta National Forest — 24 mi
  The only bottomland hardwood forest in the national forest system, some 60,000 acres of oak, ash and cypress in Sharkey County, run with the state as Sunflower Wildlife Management Area.

More markers nearby

• Jack Owens — 3.8 mi
• Skip James — 4.6 mi
• Starling-Wilburn House — 9.0 mi
• Confederate Navy Yard — 9.6 mi