Notrees
Notrees, Ector County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Post Office established 1944 in drug store of C. J. Brown, Jr., who named it in response to U.S. Postoffice Dept. request for title suitable to locality. Residents have since made history by planting shade trees. Now production hub of permian basin; center of gas processing industry, and home of Otto's boys ranch.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When a post office was established in C. J. Brown Jr.'s drugstore in 1944, the sparse West Texas locale was given the fitting name "Notrees" in response to a Post Office Department request for a title suited to the place. Residents later answered the joke by planting shade trees. The community grew into a hub of the Permian Basin's gas-processing industry and home to Otto's Boys Ranch.
Why it matters
Its very name captures the hard, treeless landscape of the Permian Basin that mid-century oil and gas wealth transformed.
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Related people
- · C. J. Brown Jr.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Goldsmith
Goldsmith, TX
Goldsmith sprang to life as an oil field on June 14, 1935, when the discovery well gushed 1,140 barrels of crude a day and shacks and tents soon housed 350 people. First platted as Ector City by Harry L. Tucker in 1937 and later renamed for landowner C. A. Goldsmith, the boomtown quickly gained cafes, a hospital, movie theater, hotels, and a newspaper—though its lone bath was a 25-cent shower from an overhead tank. It endures today as a gas processing and distribution center.
Penwell
Penwell, TX
Penwell was the cradle of Ector County's oil boom, born as the wide-open town of "Derrick City" in 1927 after driller Josh Cosden's late-1926 discovery—though the crowd scattered when the first well pumped only twenty barrels a day. A far richer strike on Robert Penn's land in 1929, followed by the 600-to-700-barrel Penn Well, revived the field, and a bustling tent city grew up around the post office established in 1930. It endured as a distribution and shipping hub, earning the name "The Crossroads of the Oil Patch."
Ector County Discovery Well
Penwell, TX
On December 28, 1926, a well drilled on W.E. Connell's land struck oil in Ector County, quietly opening the vast Permian Basin that lay beneath the West Texas plains. Its first-day yield of 38 barrels stirred little excitement, but geologists were certain of the riches below, and Robert Penn's 1929 gusher soon turned Odessa into a booming oil town. Petroleum has anchored the regional economy ever since, even though the discovery well itself was plugged and abandoned in 1940.
Kermit
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