First Producing Oil Well in Coke County

Silver, TX

Silver began about 1880 as a pioneer ranching center in Coke County, its earliest landowners running stock and its lone physician, Dr. J. E. Reed, serving the area for half a century. The town took its name from a nearby peak. When oil was discovered in 1946, drilling, refining, and workers' camps transformed the quiet ranch community into a busy oil-and-gas center, until the camps closed in 1966 and the population fell away.

Silver, TX

Stock-farming homesteaders settled the Cedar Hill area around 1890, naming it for a nearby cedar-covered rise and building a one-room school in 1891 near the cemetery that still remains. No town ever took hold — drought and hardship drove many families away by 1904, and the school closed after 1917. Three decades later an oil boom swept the county, and the once-emptied land came to sit within one of West Texas' largest oil fields.

Colorado City, TX

In the late 1870s, cattlemen were the first wave to settle Mitchell County, and the 96 Ranch became one of its anchor spreads. Round Rock merchant James Durham Wulfjen caught ranch fever on an 1884 visit, filed on three sections along the Colorado River, and coaxed his wife Mary Jane from town comfort to a lonely cabin on an old buffalo hunter's camp. He registered the enduring "96" brand in 1885 and, with his sons, grew the outfit to more than 12,000 acres of fine Durham cattle and saddle horses. The Wulfjens also helped raise schools and a church, knitting a working ranch into a lasting community.

Robert Lee, TX

When drought scorched West Texas in the 1880s, a bitter struggle erupted between landless cattlemen who relied on free grass and ranchers stringing the new barbed wire across the open range. Masked "Nippers" cut fences by night—some ranchers lost thousands of dollars in burned posts and wire—as fencing off waterholes and public land pushed cowmen toward ruin. Only new laws under Governor John Ireland finally quelled the violence.