Crockett County's First Producing Oil Well

🏛️The era

In the early 1920s, the country around Ozona was cattle and sheep country. Crockett County was big, dry and thinly settled, a place where a ranch was measured in thousands of acres and wealth was measured in livestock and grass. Almost nobody expected much from what lay under the surface.

That was changing fast across West Texas. The great Spindletop gusher near Beaumont had launched the Texas oil age back in 1901, but for two decades the action stayed mostly in the eastern and central parts of the state. In 1923, a well in nearby Reagan County, the famous Santa Rita No. 1, proved that the vast Permian Basin held oil too. Suddenly the dry ranch country west of San Angelo looked like a place worth gambling on.

Nationally, the timing could hardly have been better. Automobiles were pouring off assembly lines through the 1920s, and every one of them needed gasoline. Oil was becoming the fuel of modern American life, and independent operators with more nerve than capital were fanning out across the Southwest to drill 'wildcat' wells in unproven territory, hoping to be first to a new field.

👥People & events

The man behind this venture was not an oilman by trade. Chester R. Bunker was a New York-born World War I veteran who had made his living as a publisher and printer in Fort Worth. In 1923 his company, World Oil Co., began drilling on the ranch of L. P. Powell. It was a classic wildcat: no proven field, no guarantee, and not nearly enough money.

The work went in fits and starts, moving forward only when there were funds to keep the crew going. The marker preserves two of the men who kept it alive: superintendent Mickey Green, and a tool pusher, the crew boss on a drilling rig, remembered only by the nickname 'Dangerous Dan.' His real name has been lost, but the nickname tells you something about the rough, risky work of drilling in the 1920s.

The patience paid off in the spring of 1925. About ten miles northwest of here, the well came in at 2,647 feet and began flowing 25 barrels a day. That discovery opened what was officially called the World pool but became known simply as the Powell Field. Bunker, having made the strike, sold his rights to Humble and Marland Oil Co. Other companies followed, and in time some 180 wells dotted Powell's 9,260-acre ranch. The Powell family's heirs kept the land itself.

The most remarkable part of the story may be its staying power. Powell No. 1 kept producing year after year, and when this marker was written it was still pumping about 10 barrels a day under Petro-Lewis. A second major strike, in the Crockett Field in 1938, confirmed that the county had become oil country for good.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Powell No. 1 is a small, sturdy piece of one of the biggest stories of 20th-century America: the rise of the Permian Basin. The wells that came in across this region in the 1920s helped turn West Texas into one of the most productive oil regions in the world, and that oil fueled the cars, factories and economy of a rapidly modernizing nation.

The story also shows how that boom actually happened. It was not only giant corporations but outsiders and small operators, like a Fort Worth printer, who took the first risks. Once a wildcatter proved a field, larger companies moved in with the money to develop it. Humble Oil, one of the buyers here, went on to become one of the great names of American oil.

Finally, it is a story about how oil remade rural places. Before 1925, Crockett County's economy ran on ranching. By the time this marker went up, the county counted more than 2,000 producing oil and gas wells. Across Texas, mineral wealth under ranch land created new income for landowners, new jobs and new towns, and that same pattern repeated across much of the American West.

🧭If you visit

This is wide-open West Texas: big sky, mesquite and rolling ranch land that still looks much as it did when the drillers first arrived. The well itself lies about ten miles northwest, so the marker is your place to stop and take in the story rather than the site of the strike itself.

As you drive through the area, watch for pumpjacks nodding slowly in the pastures. They are the modern descendants of that first well, and a reminder that ranching and oil have shared this land for a century. Respect private property; most of the oil land here is working ranch land.

Ozona makes a pleasant, quiet stop for a trip across West Texas, and the marker pairs naturally with other Permian Basin oil history in the surrounding counties. Bring water, fill your tank when you can, and give yourself time. Distances out here are long, and that emptiness is part of what makes the story of a cash-strapped wildcat crew so striking.