Queens of the Oil Age

The Coordinates series celebrates lesser-known locales worth visiting across the state. In 1925 a wildcatter who regularly conned investors into funding half-hearted explorations of what he suspected were dry holes sweet-talked a widowed farm owner into letting him drill on her land. Unfortunately for him, the Daisy Bradford No. 3 struck black gold five years later, marking the discovery of the massive East Texas oil field. Speculators rushed to the area, and almost overnight Kilgore was no longer a struggling cotton burg. At one point, more than a thousand derricks stood within the town’s limits, including two dozen lining a block that came to be known as the World’s Richest Acre. Nearly all the structures were dismantled as the wells played out, but in the eighties some…

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