Corsicana wanted water. In 1894 the city hired a well contractor, the American Well and Prospecting Company, run by H. G. Johnston, Elmer Akins and Charles Rittersbacher, to drill for its supply. On June 9 the bit reached about 1,030 feet (accounts give 1,027 or 1,035) and struck oil. The crew cased off the producing formation, but oil kept rising outside the pipe.
Three wells in two years
On September 6, 1894, Ralph Beaton, H. G. Damon and a Pennsylvania oilman, John Davidson, organized the Corsicana Oil Development Company. Eight days later it agreed with John H. Galey of Pittsburgh that he would drill five wells at his own expense for half the company's leases. The first, finished October 15, 1895, flowed two and a half barrels a day. The second was dry. The third, completed in May 1896, made 22 barrels. Output was 1,450 barrels in 1896, 65,975 in 1897 and 544,620 in 1898, and peaked at 839,554 in 1900. Local historians call it the first significant commercial discovery west of the Mississippi; Neodesha, Kansas, where a well came in in 1892, makes a similar claim.
A refinery and a dusty street
The oil had almost no local buyer. The only Texas refinery was at Sour Lake, and operators sometimes poured surplus on the ground. Mayor James E. Whitesell and other leaders invited Joseph S. Cullinan, a Pennsylvania oilman, to advise them. Accounts place his arrival in 1894 or 1897. He contracted to buy 150,000 barrels at fifty cents and to build a refinery, and when the first backers withdrew he raised the $150,000 elsewhere. The stills were fired by the end of 1898, and the first shipment left on February 24, 1899. Crude rose from fifty cents to 98 cents a barrel, and to $1.10 by May 1900. By July the plant ran 1,500 barrels a day. Cullinan also pushed oil as locomotive fuel, gas for lighting and heating, and oil to settle the dust on city streets.
The road to Beaumont
Jim Hamill, who had drilled artesian wells at Waco, moved to Corsicana, and his brother Al joined him. In 1900 the American Well and Prospecting Company secured rights to a hydraulic rotary rig, and local machines became known as Corsicana rigs. In September 1900 Capt. Anthony Lucas, then at Corsicana, hired the Hamills to drill his Spindletop test well for backers who included Galey, the same man who had contracted to drill for the Corsicana company. The crew shut down on December 24 so Al and Curt Hamill could spend Christmas at home in Corsicana. On January 10, 1901, the well blew in from about 1,139 feet, and Galey estimated the flow at 80,000 to 100,000 barrels a day.
Cullinan reached Spindletop a few days before the well was capped. He moved his operations to Beaumont in 1901 and founded the Texas Company in 1902. Corsicana's drilling and yields fell in 1901 and 1902 as the Gulf Coast took the attention.
On South 12th Street, Petroleum Industry Park has a steel drilling tower, and a pipe in the ground marks the water well that started it.