The Wortham Oil Boom
Wortham, Freestone County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The city of Wortham rejected a well drilled by C. L. Witherspoon in 1912 when it produced gas, not water. However, oil and gas wells in 1919-23 gave prosperity to neighbors north and south, and petroleum exploration began here. Discovery well for the Wortham Field, Roy Simmons No. 1 (1 mi. S), came in as a gusher on Nov. 27, 1924. Within three weeks over 300 drilling rigs were in the field. 3,509,768 barrels of oil were produced in Jan. 1925; total for the year was 16,838,150 barrels. Wasteful drilling slowed yield to 3,000 barrels a day by Sept. 1927, and the boom was concluded.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Wortham once turned away a well that struck gas instead of water in 1912, but the oil strikes of nearby fields soon drew prospectors back. On November 27, 1924, the Roy Simmons No. 1 came in as a gusher, and within three weeks more than three hundred rigs crowded the field. Nearly seventeen million barrels flowed in 1925 alone before wasteful over-drilling choked the yield and ended the boom by 1927.
Why it matters
The Wortham field is a textbook case of the frantic, wasteful early Texas oil booms whose excesses helped spur the state toward regulating its most valuable resource.
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Related people
- · C. L. Witherspoon
Related events
- · Wortham oil boom
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
City of Wortham
Wortham, TX
Wortham grew from an 1834 Mexican land grant to English colonist Robert B. Longbotham, who later sold a railroad right-of-way through his property for a token five dollars. Renamed for a colonel who helped secure the line, the town stayed a modest market center until a Thanksgiving Day gusher in 1924 turned it into a roaring oil boomtown—its population leaping from a thousand to tens of thousands almost overnight. The boom burned out by late 1927, leaving a town that had briefly touched the frenzy of the Texas oil age.
Wortham Schools
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Education in Wortham began in the 1870s as a cooperative effort of the Masonic Lodge and the Methodist church, with ministers teaching from donated books, before the first public school opened in 1883. In 1891 Wortham became the first independent school district in Freestone County, and the discovery of oil in 1924 transformed a town of 1,000 into a boomtown of 20,000 nearly overnight — swelling one classroom from 18 pupils to 84 in just four days. The system grew by absorbing rural schools and, in 1966, merged the F. W. Wheeler School for Black students into a single district.
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