At 4:30 on the afternoon of January 10, 1921, Dr. Samuel Busey's drill reached 2,233 feet on David Armstrong's farm, about a mile southwest of town, and oil came up. Estimates of the flow run from 3,000 to 10,000 barrels of oil and water a day. El Dorado was an agricultural town of about 4,000; the 1920 census counted 3,887. Arkansas sold 38,000 barrels of oil in March 1921 and 908,000 in June.
Hamburger Row
Within weeks, barrelhouses, gambling and prostitution filled the blocks across from the railroad station on South Washington Street, named for the hamburger stands beside the depot. By 1923 the town had 59 oil companies, and with no beds left, tents and shacks spread through whole neighborhoods. Accounts of the peak in 1925 range from nearly 30,000 people to more than 40,000.
The next field was at Smackover, twelve miles north. Sidney Umsted struck oil there on July 1, 1922, and within six months more than 1,000 wells stood in the ground and the town had grown from about 90 people to 25,000. On November 27, more than 200 masked, robed men drove through in cars with signs ordering gamblers and "the lawless element" out within a day. They burned a building, whipped some men, and shot E. J. Wood dead at Ouachita City. Newspapers disagreed about the toll, and about whether the Ku Klux Klan was behind it; Klan officials in Camden denied it. No one was arrested, and about 1,100 people left by train.
The color line
Black Arkansans worked in the oil industry, and the same season brought them notices. In December 1922, unsigned notices went up in the oil fields of southern Ouachita County ordering Black residents to leave, and many did. El Dorado had already seen it once: after a riot in 1910, many Black homes and businesses were destroyed, and the number of deaths is unknown.
On August 10, 1923, a young Black teamster named Ed Brock was accused of insulting Mrs. W. C. Ranoff, the wife of an oil field worker, at Murphyville, probably an oil camp near Norphlet. A mob of oil workers seized him and lynched him. Five oil field workers, including Ranoff, were arrested two days later and held without bond.
What it built
The money rebuilt the town. The nine-story Exchange Bank, Lion Oil's headquarters, rose in 1926 and 1927. The Union County Courthouse followed in 1927 and 1928, a $750,000 building faced in Batesville marble. The Rialto Theatre opened in September 1929 at a cost of $250,000, with 1,400 seats, 500 of them in two balconies. Black patrons entered by a side door and a back stairwell to the rear of the balcony, behind a three-foot barrier. The Murphy family, which had worked in lumber and banking, was in oil by the 1930s, and Murphy Oil still has its headquarters here.
To see it, start at the Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources at Smackover, with its rebuilt boomtown street and derrick, then walk the courthouse blocks of the El Dorado Commercial Historic District to the Rialto on East Cedar Street.