Billionth Barrel
Andrews, Andrews County, Texas
Marker Inscription
On May 25, 1965, from one of 7,400 producing oil wells in the county's 196 fields, came the Billionth Barrel of Andrews County crude oil. In the 35 years and 5 months since oil flowed from the county's discovery well, C. E. Ogden No. 1, in Dec. 1929, Andrews has attained a new place in history. In 1929, the county had about 400 people. Its wealth, mostly in land and livestock, amounted to $8,109,399. Five persons in the county filed income tax returns. There were fewer than 100 children in school. Highway bonds in the amount of $200,000 were about to be issued, as a measure for county improvement. By 1956, Andrews County produced more than 60,000,000 barrels of oil annually--gaining recognition as number one in Texas and in the United States. Of great significance is the fact that presently proven reserves underlying the county total more than one billion barrels, without any consideration for additional recoveries by secondary methods. Andrews is more than a product of the billion barrels of crude of oil it has produced, more than the gasoline plants working through the night, more than modern highways, paved streets, homes, schools, dreams. Its destiny is great in human resources--and oil. (1965)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When oil first flowed from the C. E. Ogden No. 1 discovery well in December 1929, Andrews County was a sparse ranching country of about 400 people. By May 25, 1965, the county's billionth barrel of crude rose from one of thousands of wells across nearly 200 oil fields, and Andrews had become one of the nation's top petroleum producers. The transformation brought paved streets, new schools, and a wealth measured in reserves rather than livestock.
Why it matters
The billionth barrel marks the mid-century oil boom that remade West Texas, turning remote ranch counties into engines of American energy and prosperity.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Picture the high, flat country of far West Texas in the late 1920s: wide grassland, scattered windmills, cattle, and a sky that seems to go on forever. Andrews County sat on the western edge of the state near the New Mexico line. It was ranching country, thinly settled and far from the cities. Wealth meant land and livestock, and very few residents earned enough to owe income tax.
Underneath that grass lay part of the Permian Basin, one of the richest oil-bearing regions on Earth. Through the 1920s, drillers worked their way across West Texas, and one county after another found that the ground below was worth far more than the ground on top. The discovery well came into Andrews County in December 1929, just weeks after the stock market crash that opened the Great Depression.
The timing is striking. While much of the country slid into hard times, oil gave this remote county a different future. Over the next three and a half decades the industry grew through the Depression, the huge fuel demands of World War II, and the postwar boom in cars, highways, and suburbs. By the mid-1950s Andrews County was producing more oil each year than any other county in Texas or the United States.
By 1965, when the billionth barrel came up, Americans were driving more than ever. The interstate highway system was spreading, and a whole economy ran on cheap petroleum. Andrews County was one of the places that kept the tanks full.
People & events
The story starts with one well, the C. E. Ogden No. 1, which brought in oil in December 1929. A discovery well matters because it proves the oil is there. Once it does, leases change hands, rigs arrive, and a quiet place can turn into a boomtown almost overnight.
The numbers on the marker tell the rest. In 1929 the county had about 400 people and fewer than 100 schoolchildren, and only a handful of residents filed income tax returns. County leaders were preparing a modest highway bond issue to improve the roads. Over the next 35 years that sparse ranching community became home to thousands of producing wells spread across nearly 200 separate oil fields.
Then came May 25, 1965, when the county's billionth barrel of crude rose from one of those wells. No single well produces a milestone like that. It belonged to everyone involved: the roughnecks and drillers, the pumpers who checked wells in every kind of weather, the crews at the gasoline plants that ran through the night, and the families who came to build a town around the work.
The marker's closing lines are worth noticing. Written at a moment of triumph, they insist that Andrews is more than its barrels: its homes, schools, and people are its real wealth. The marker also states that proven reserves of more than a billion barrels still lay underground, which suggests the people who placed it saw the billionth barrel as a halfway point, not an ending.
Its place in the American story
Andrews County's story is a small-scale version of how oil remade the American West in the twentieth century. Again and again, isolated ranching counties found themselves sitting on reserves that changed their economies, their populations, and their place in the nation within a single generation.
The Permian Basin in particular became a cornerstone of American energy. Oil from fields like these fueled the expanding car culture, supplied the military during World War II, and supported the postwar prosperity that defined mid-century America. When the marker notes that Andrews ranked first in the nation in annual production, it is describing a county that mattered far beyond Texas.
There is also a lesson here about change and its costs. Boom economies bring sudden wealth but also dependence on a single industry whose fortunes rise and fall with world prices. The marker's hopeful words about human resources read as an early recognition of that truth: a community has to build something that lasts longer than any one oil field.
In that sense the billionth barrel is a national story. It shows how natural resources, technology, and ordinary working people turned empty country into the industrial heart of a region, and how quickly American places could be transformed in the oil age.
If you visit
Andrews is a West Texas oil town, and you will notice it right away. Pumpjacks nod across the flat landscape, pipelines and tank batteries line the roads, and the horizon stretches wide in every direction. Seeing the marker against that working landscape helps you understand its numbers.
When you stand at the marker, try to imagine the same view in 1929: mostly grass, cattle, and very few people. The contrast between that picture and the busy oil country around you today is the whole point of the story.
West Texas distances are long, so plan your drive with care: services can be spread out, and summer heat is serious. Andrews makes a natural stop on a Permian Basin road trip that also takes in the larger oil cities of the region, where you can learn more about how the industry shaped this part of Texas.
If you are traveling with kids, the scale of the numbers makes a good conversation: a billion barrels from a county that once had fewer than a hundred schoolchildren. Ask them what they think changed first, the roads, the schools, or the people.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related events
- · Andrews County billionth barrel of crude oil, 1965
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
J. S. Means Ranch House
Andrews, TX
Built in 1900, this is among the oldest houses in Andrews County, raised at the exact point where four claimants' land sections met so each could satisfy the legal requirement to live on his claim. After the group proved up their claims, they sold to Mr. and Mrs. J. S. Means, who by 1904 held fourteen sections and kept adding land to build a thriving cattle ranch. The operation ran cattle even after oil fields spread across the range in the 1920s.
Original Townsite of Andrews
Andrews, TX
When Andrews County was organized in 1910, the new town of Andrews rose on land homesteaded by Robert Madison "Bob" Means, who had begun ranching the West Texas plains with his father in 1899. In a colorful county-seat fight against rival Shafter City, Means famously deeded town lots to local cowboys so they could register as voters and swing the election. He served as county clerk and gave land and money to the growing town for the rest of his life, retiring comfortably after oil was struck on his land in 1934.
Early Settlers of Andrews County
Andrews, TX
Andrews County sat on one of Texas's last frontiers, where Anglo settlement lagged some sixty years behind the rest of the state because of Comanche resistance and a punishing scarcity of water. O. B. Holt filed the first land claim in 1886, and hardy families like the Cowdens and Peter Von Holebeke followed, but by 1900 the county still counted only 87 people and did not organize until 1910. Windmill pumps and drift fences finally made ranching workable on the dry plains, and the 1930 discovery of oil turned decades of stubborn endurance into sudden prosperity.
Andrews County Discovery Well
Andrews County, TX
In December 1929 the Deep Rock Oil Company brought in the C. E. Ogden No. 1, a well producing 200 barrels a day from the San Andres lime formation—the discovery well of Andrews County and the first of 730 wells in the Fuhrman-Mascho field. Purchased by the Tripplehorn brothers of Fort Worth in 1932, it kept pumping for decades. By the mid-1960s Andrews had become the top oil-producing county in Texas and the nation, having yielded more than a billion barrels.