Sabine River Off Shore Wells
Longview, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The vast East Texas oilfield was discovered in October 1930, and wells were soon located across the field in five Texas counties. Drilling was expanded to include the Sabine River bed, which was owned by the state of Texas, in late summer 1932. The riverbed was divided into tracts and leased to drilling companies. The first well was drilled by the U-Tex Oil Company, which was made up of investors from Texas and Utah. The well was drilled to a depth of 3,466 feet and continues to produce today. The derricks that remain in the Sabine River near this site are the last standing of the approximately 200 wells drilled in the riverbed, and are a testament to the engineering ingenuity of an important Texas industry.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The giant East Texas oilfield was discovered in October 1930, and within two years drillers pushed into the bed of the Sabine River itself, which the state of Texas owned. The riverbed was carved into tracts and leased out, and the first well—sunk by the U-Tex Oil Company to nearly 3,500 feet—still produces today. The weathered derricks standing in the river near this spot are the last of roughly 200 wells once drilled in its channel.
Why it matters
These river derricks are relics of the East Texas oil boom, the largest field of its day, whose gushers reshaped the state's economy and helped power a nation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In October 1930, a wildcat well in East Texas came in and changed the state forever. The strike revealed the East Texas oilfield — an underground reservoir so vast it would sprawl across five counties and dwarf anything the industry had seen. It arrived, as luck would have it, in the opening year of the Great Depression.
The timing cut both ways. A flood of new oil sent prices crashing and threw the young field into chaos, but it also drew thousands of workers to towns like Longview at a moment when work was scarce everywhere else. Derricks went up almost overnight; farmland became a forest of steel.
By the time drillers turned their attention to the Sabine River itself in the late summer of 1932, the field was already famous. The riverbed was a special prize because it belonged to the state of Texas, which meant the public — not private landowners — held the mineral rights beneath the flowing water.
People & events
The state divided the riverbed into tracts and leased them out, and the companies that took them faced a genuine engineering puzzle: how to sink a well not through solid ground but through a river. The answer was to build derricks that stood in the water, planting industrial structures in a moving channel.
The first of these wells was drilled by the U-Tex Oil Company, a venture whose very name told its story — a partnership of investors from Texas and Utah, drawn together by the promise of the boom. Their well reached down 3,466 feet, and remarkably, it never stopped: it still produces today, nearly a century on.
Roughly two hundred wells were eventually drilled in the Sabine's bed. The handful of derricks that still rise from the water near this spot are the last survivors of that fleet — the physical remnant of a bold, unusual chapter when oilmen took their trade right out into the middle of a river.
Its place in the American story
The East Texas oilfield was, in its day, the largest oil discovery the United States had ever known, and its consequences reached far beyond Texas. The sheer volume of oil it produced reshaped the American energy market and helped make the nation an oil power at a pivotal moment in the twentieth century.
The chaos of those early years also forced a reckoning. A field this productive, developed all at once, drove prices so low and pumped so recklessly that Texas and the federal government stepped in to regulate production — a turning point in how America managed its oil resources.
The river derricks are a small but vivid piece of that national story. They stand for the ingenuity the boom demanded and for a hard truth of the era: that oil was so valuable, and so central to the country's future, that men would build their rigs in the middle of a flowing river to reach it.
If you visit
Look to the water. The reason to stop here is the sight of aging derricks standing where you would least expect industrial machinery — out in the Sabine River itself, weathered by decades of current and weather. There is nothing else quite like it.
Think about what you are seeing as you look: the last of roughly two hundred such structures, and beneath one of them, a well that has been quietly producing since 1932. That combination of the visibly old and the still-working gives the scene its particular power.
This makes a memorable stop on any drive through the East Texas oil country around Longview and Gregg County, a region whose towns were built by the boom. Bring the marker's story with you, take in the derricks from a safe vantage, and let them stand in for the whole enormous field that once turned this quiet countryside into the center of the oil world.
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 events
- · Discovery of the East Texas oilfield
Themes & tags
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