Driller Park
Kilgore, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
On April 24, 1947, more than 3,100 fans celebrated the postwar return of baseball as the Kilgore Drillers played the Henderson Oilers on Driller Park's opening day. Erected by the Kilgore Baseball Club for $100,000 on land deeded to the city of Kilgore by S. S. Laird, the park straddles the line between Gregg and Rusk counties. An excellent example of small stadium engineering, the ballpark was constructed of oil field pipe, tank steel, and concrete with an infield underground drainage system. Though the Drillers disbanded in 1950, Driller Park continues to be a haven for baseball in the city of Kilgore. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On opening day in April 1947, more than 3,100 fans packed Driller Park to watch the Kilgore Drillers—a joyful marker of baseball's return after World War II. Built by the local baseball club on land straddling the Gregg–Rusk county line, the ballpark was an ingenious product of the East Texas oil boom, framed from oil-field pipe and tank steel over an engineered drainage system. Though the Drillers folded in 1950, the field endured as a home for the local game.
Why it matters
The park captures how postwar communities—here flush with oilfield ingenuity—rallied around minor-league baseball as a centerpiece of civic life.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the spring of 1947, America was learning how to be at peace again. The Second World War had ended less than two years before, and across the country communities were reaching for the ordinary pleasures that wartime had put on hold. Few things said "normal life has returned" more clearly than the crack of a bat and a full grandstand on opening day.
Kilgore sat in the heart of the East Texas oil field, and that fact runs straight through this story. The region had boomed on oil, and the wealth, the know-how, and the raw materials of the oil business shaped everything — including, as it turned out, how a town built a ballpark. Minor-league and semipro baseball were flourishing nationwide in these postwar years, and towns took real civic pride in fielding a team.
The park itself straddles the line between Gregg and Rusk counties, a small geographic quirk that hints at how the East Texas oil country sprawled across county lines without much regard for them. Into this moment of postwar optimism and oilfield prosperity, Kilgore built itself a place to play.
People & events
On April 24, 1947, more than 3,100 fans turned out to watch the Kilgore Drillers take on the Henderson Oilers on Driller Park's opening day — a crowd celebrating the postwar return of the game as much as the game itself. The very names of the teams, Drillers and Oilers, tell you what kind of country this was.
The park existed because of a partnership between civic will and private generosity. The Kilgore Baseball Club spent one hundred thousand dollars to build it — a serious sum for the time — on land that S. S. Laird deeded to the city of Kilgore. It was, in the truest sense, a community's investment in itself.
What the builders made was a small marvel of practical engineering, and unmistakably a product of the oil field. The ballpark was framed from oil-field pipe and tank steel and set in concrete, with an underground drainage system beneath the infield so play could go on. The Drillers themselves disbanded in 1950, after only a few seasons, but the park they christened outlived them and has remained a haven for baseball in Kilgore ever since.
Its place in the American story
Driller Park distills a national mood into a single ballfield. In the years right after World War II, communities across America rallied around minor-league baseball as a centerpiece of civic life — an affordable, shared, hometown pleasure that knit people back together after years of sacrifice. The 3,100 who came out on opening day were part of a countrywide return to the everyday.
What makes this park distinctly American in its particulars is how it was built. Rather than importing materials, Kilgore built its ballpark out of what it had in abundance: oil-field pipe, tank steel, the ingenuity of people who spent their working lives engineering solutions in the ground. The stadium is a monument to that kind of resourcefulness, where local industry and local recreation were forged, almost literally, from the same steel.
And there's a lesson in its survival. The team that gave the park its name lasted only a few seasons, yet the field endured for generations. It's a reminder that the institutions we build for our communities can outlive their original purpose, becoming something a town holds onto not for what it was but for what it still gives.
If you visit
Come for the details that betray the park's origins. This is a ballpark literally built from the oil field — look for the pipe and tank-steel construction that framed it, the concrete, and remember the engineered drainage system hidden beneath the infield that kept the game going. Knowing what it's made of turns an ordinary small stadium into something you'll never see quite the same way again.
Savor the sense of continuity. On the very ground where more than 3,100 people cheered in 1947, baseball is still played. There's a particular pleasure in standing in a place that has kept doing the same joyful thing for generations, long after the original Drillers took their last swing.
It's a natural stop on a road trip through the East Texas oil country around Kilgore, a region whose whole identity was shaped by the boom. Pair a look at the park with the area's oil heritage and you'll see both sides of the same story — the industry that built the wealth, and the ballpark where a town spent some of it on pure, shared happiness. And keep an eye on your feet: this is one of those rare fields where you can stand with each foot in a different county.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · S.S. Laird
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Kilgore College Administration Building
Kilgore, TX
In 1935, with the East Texas oil field booming even as the Great Depression gripped the nation, Kilgore residents voted to found a junior college. Classes met in the high school until this building was finished in 1936 with help from the federal Public Works Administration. Designed by the San Antonio firm of Phelps and Dewees, the administration building is a fine example of the streamlined Art Moderne style of its day.
First Presbyterian Church
Kilgore, TX
This congregation began in 1850 as the rural Gum Spring Presbyterian Church and followed its people into Kilgore by 1874. When the East Texas oil boom exploded across the 1930s—derricks crowding right up against the church lot—the flush of prosperity paid for this Gothic sanctuary, with its tri-partite arched entry and grand stained-glass window. The building marks where old-time Presbyterian piety met the frenzy of black gold.
St. Luke's United Methodist Church
Kilgore, TX
The Kilgore Methodist Society formed in 1873 as families moved to the new railroad town, and its early life was bound up with the Rev. Isaac Alexander, who moved his female academy here and renamed it Alexander Institute — the forerunner of Lon Morris College. After a frame sanctuary was lost to arson during the wild Kilgore oil boom of 1931, the congregation raised the Tudor Gothic fieldstone church that stands today in 1932.
Kilgore National Bank Building
Kilgore, TX
When oil gushed in East Texas in the early 1930s, Kilgore transformed almost overnight from a sleepy town into a forest of drilling derricks and sudden fortunes—even as the rest of the nation sank into the Great Depression. Flush with that prosperity, the Kilgore National Bank's directors commissioned this handsome Art Moderne building in 1937, designed by Henderson architect James L. Downing. Its sleek, streamlined lines were a confident statement of boomtown wealth in hard times.