First Oil Well Drilled in Eastland County
Ranger, Eastland County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The J.H. McCleskey No. 1 Discovery Well of the Ranger Pool was drilled by Warren Wagner under the supervision of W.K. Gordon of the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company, July 2-October 27, 1917. Initial production was 1600 barrels with three million feet of gas. Abandoned May 30, 1930 after producing 275,000 barrels of oil.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On a Texas afternoon in the fall of 1917, the McCleskey No. 1 came in gushing, and the sleepy town of Ranger was never the same. Drilled through that summer and autumn under the eye of W.K. Gordon of the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company, the well opened the Ranger Pool and touched off one of the great oil booms of the World War I era. It flowed for thirteen years before being capped, having produced hundreds of thousands of barrels.
Why it matters
Discovery wells like this one turned rural Texas into the engine room of America's oil century, fueling the wartime economy and the automobile age that followed.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By 1917, Texas already knew what oil could do. The great Spindletop gusher near Beaumont in 1901 had launched the Gulf Coast oil industry, and wildcatters had been probing the rest of the state ever since. But much of West-Central Texas was still ranch and farm country, a land of small towns strung along the railroad.
Ranger was one of those towns, a stop on the Texas and Pacific line in Eastland County. Its fortunes rose and fell with cattle, cotton, and the weather. Coal also had a local presence: the company whose men drilled this well was the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company, and its name shows the fuel business it began in.
The national backdrop was dramatic. The United States entered World War I in April 1917, just a few months before drilling began here. Modern war ran on petroleum, in ships, trucks, and the new airplanes. Finding new oil suddenly mattered well beyond Texas.
People & events
Drilling on the J.H. McCleskey No. 1 began on July 2, 1917. Warren Wagner did the drilling, under the supervision of W.K. Gordon of the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company. Drilling through a Texas summer and into fall was slow, hot, uncertain work. Every day the crew pushed deeper, they had no guarantee that anything waited at the bottom.
On October 27, 1917, it paid off. The well came in with an initial production of 1,600 barrels of oil, along with about three million feet of natural gas. That is a remarkable showing for a discovery well. It proved there was a real pool of oil beneath Ranger, which became known as the Ranger Pool.
The well had a long working life. It kept producing until May 30, 1930, when it was abandoned after yielding about 275,000 barrels. By then, the discovery it made had long since remade the town and the region around it.
Its place in the American story
The McCleskey well touched off one of the best-known oil booms in Texas history. In its aftermath, Ranger and nearby towns filled almost overnight with drillers, speculators, and workers looking for a stake. The boom was fast, crowded, and chaotic, and the region's economy changed for good.
It also came at a pivotal moment. The discovery came in during wartime, when the nation's appetite for fuel was soaring, and oil from fields like this one helped feed that demand. In the years after the war, those same fields supplied the growing automobile age.
Most of all, the Ranger discovery helped show that Texas oil was not only a Gulf Coast story. Wells like this pushed exploration inland and west and helped set up the later strikes that made Texas synonymous with petroleum. From a single rig in a ranching county came a small piece of America's twentieth-century energy history.
If you visit
The marker stands in the Ranger area of Eastland County, just off the interstate as you cross West-Central Texas. It's a quick, worthwhile stop. As you stand there, compare the quiet countryside with the boom it once set off. It's easy to imagine derricks crowding the horizon and wagons and early trucks churning the roads.
Look at the town itself too. Ranger's older downtown still has hints of the years when oil money flowed through it, and it's interesting to see how a boom town looks a century after the rush.
For a road trip, pair this stop with the other oil and ranching history in the surrounding counties. If you're traveling between Fort Worth and Abilene, it's an easy detour that turns a long highway drive into a lesson in how Texas became oil country.
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 people
- · W.K. Gordon
- · Warren Wagner
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Roaring Ranger
Ranger, TX
When World War I drove oil demand sky-high, Texas Pacific Coal Company manager W.K. Gordon gambled on deep drilling, and in October 1917 the McClesky No. 1 blew in as a 1,700-barrel-a-day gusher a mile south of here. Later wells yielded many thousands of barrels daily, and a village of a dozen houses exploded into a boomtown so crowded that beds were shared in shifts and stuffed chairs were rented for sleeping. Amid a two-year sea of mud, easy money drew both fortune-seekers and vice, until lawmen cracked down after five murders in a single day.
Site of J.H. McCleskey No. 1, Discovery Well of the Ranger Oil Boom
Ranger, TX
By 1917 area farmers and ranchers were reeling from drought and boll weevils when Texas and Pacific Coal Company manager William Knox Gordon bet that oil lay far deeper than earlier dry holes had reached. Contractor Warren Wagner drilled here on J. H. McCleskey's farm, and on October 17, 1917, at 3,432 feet the well roared in at an estimated 1,600 barrels a day. It ignited the wild, prolific Ranger boom, whose oil helped relieve wartime shortages and let the Allies, as the saying went, 'float to victory on a wave of oil.'
Merriman Cemetery
Ranger, TX
Begun around 1873 as a community graveyard just as Eastland County was organized, this cemetery holds early settlers, flu victims from the 1916–17 epidemic, and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War to Korea. The 1917 oil strike on nearby land triggered a boom, and speculators reportedly offered a large sum to lease the burial ground for drilling—an offer the local congregation refused, preserving the site's sanctity.
Merriman Baptist Church
Ranger vicinity, TX
Local Baptists met in private homes for years before organizing the Merriman Baptist Church in 1892 and raising a small frame meeting house. When an oil boom struck in 1917, the congregation leased its drilling rights, and a gusher soon earned the church hundreds of dollars a day. Keeping only what it needed to operate, the small congregation gave roughly $100,000 a year to missions, orphanages, seminaries, and charities. Drilling noise eventually drove services to a tabernacle, and in 1922 the members built a brick sanctuary they still used generations later.