Trees City Office & Bank

Trees City was a company town with a short, busy life. Joe Trees and Mike Benedum, early developers of the Caddo field, founded it in 1909 through the Trees Oil Company. The 1910 frame building first held the offices of Stiles and Cunningham, who effectively ran the town from it, and a bank opened there between about 1912 and 1915 and ran until the Depression. It was also a polling place, with a justice of the peace and a notary. Field output rose from 4,560 barrels in 1906 to a peak of 11,144,000 in 1918.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Oil and Gas Museum — 0.7 mi
  The state's first public petroleum museum in Oil City, on the 1905 Caddo Parish strike and the 1911 over-water well on Caddo Lake, with a derrick and a log-jam exhibit.
• Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 12 mi
  Wetlands and woods on part of a former ammunition plant, now a refuge for wood ducks, prothonotary warblers and alligator snapping turtles, with four easy trails and a free visitor center on a Ramsar lake.
• Caddo Lake State Park — 13 mi
  A Civilian Conservation Corps park on the Texas shore of Caddo Lake, where the Caddo told of a lake made by wind-driven water and visitors now paddle Big Cypress Bayou past moss-hung bald cypress.
• Shreveport Water Works Museum — 20 mi
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Oil City — steps away
• Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter — 0.9 mi
• Caddo Lake — 1.0 mi
• First Over Water Oil Well — 1.0 mi