More than 500 Midland business and civic leaders, led by George T. Abell, built this museum, and it opened in 1975 on the interstate west of town. It calls itself the nation's largest museum devoted to the petroleum industry, and its argument starts underground. The basin's oil and gas lie in rock laid down under a sea that covered this country about 230 million years ago, and a reef grew along its edge. The museum's original 1975 reef diorama, restored, is the first thing past the theater.
The galleries move up through the rock and into the business. A recreated 1930s boom-town street with a general store and land office stands for Midland's early oil years; later rooms take the industry through the companies, OPEC in the 1960s and the drilling and seismic methods that changed what the basin could give. The Petroleum Hall of Fame honors the people of the local industry, and Tom Lovell's paintings of oil-field history hang here.
Outside, the Oil Patch is a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and equipment that the museum calls the largest collection of its kind in the world, among them Santa Rita No. 2, a 148-foot mast rotary rig and a steel derrick of the 1930s. The Chaparral Gallery holds the cars Jim Hall and Hap Sharp built and raced from Midland from 1962, where Hall introduced the movable rear wing in 1965.
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