Industry & Invention

Brenham, TX

Elijah Allcorn arrived in Stephen F. Austin's colony in late 1821 as one of the "Old 300," the first legal Anglo-American colonists in Mexican Texas, and helped name New Year Creek while camping on its banks on New Year's Day 1822. His family farmed, raised stock, and hauled freight to the frontier settlements clustered around Washington-on-the-Brazos. The main house, dated to about 1845, passed through the Allcorn, Wilkins, Samuel, and finally Kokemoor families, who held it for more than a century and layered on wings, a cistern, barns, and sheds that trace a farmstead's slow growth into the 20th century.

Altoona, PA · est. 1999

Raised in 1811, the Alleghany Furnace was among the earliest ironworks in what became Blair County, part of the charcoal-iron industry that spread through Pennsylvania's mountains in the early republic. Elias Baker acquired full ownership by 1844 and built a Greek Revival mansion nearby, tying the furnace to a prosperous ironmaster's household that ran it until it went cold in 1884. The surviving stone store building, erected around 1837, still marks the site of this vanished industrial world.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1967

Rising on the banks of the Allegheny in 1814, this federal arsenal was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, one of the young republic's most important architects. For generations it garrisoned troops and manufactured and stored munitions, feeding the U.S. Army through the Civil War, the Indian Wars of the West, and the Spanish-American War. As an ordnance works it made Pittsburgh a linchpin of American military supply across the nineteenth century.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2007

In 1845 and 1848, women who worked the cotton factories of Allegheny City walked off the job to protest brutal twelve-hour workdays, taking a stand in one of early America's first waves of industrial labor action. Their protests helped push Pennsylvania to pass an 1848 law capping the workday at ten hours and barring children under twelve from cotton and textile mills. These were among the earliest organized efforts by American working women to demand humane conditions.

Pittsburgh, PA

When Allegheny County was carved out of Westmoreland and Washington counties in 1788, its seat at Pittsburgh was already a generation old — laid out in 1764 at the strategic forks where the Allegheny and Monongahela join to form the Ohio, a gateway that had drawn soldiers, traders, and settlers pushing west. Incorporated as a city in 1816, Pittsburgh grew into one of the great engines of American industry, its furnaces and mills pouring out the iron and steel that earned the region its "Workshop of the World" reputation. The county's story runs straight from a frontier river junction to the smoke-and-fire heart of the nation's industrial age.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1788 and named for the Allegheny River, this county grew around Pittsburgh, a settlement laid out in 1764 at the strategic forks of the Ohio. As the 19th century advanced, the city's furnaces and mills made it a titan of iron and steel, earning it the boast "Workshop of the World." Immigrants poured in to feed the industry that armed and built modern America.

Hearne, TX

Built in 1872 on land bought from the International Railroad Company, this Hearne store passed through several owners before R. A. Allen purchased it in 1891 and brought in his son Robert. Their heirs have kept it in the family and running ever since. In earlier days its shelves held everything a frontier town needed—seeds, saddles, wagons, implements, and even coffins.

Quintana, TX

Built in 1883 by the Jarvis family of Old Quintana, this well-known boarding house long served travelers and residents on the Brazoria County coast. It weathered a century of Gulf hurricanes, including the devastating Hurricane Carla of 1961, and was later restored by owner B. T. Allen. The surviving structure recalls the small resort and coastal communities that once dotted the Texas shore.

Pasadena, TX

This busy commercial district was once the Allen Ranch, among the oldest and largest in southeast Texas, rooted in an 1824 Mexican land grant to Morris Callahan. Samuel William Allen and later his son Samuel Ezekiel Allen built it into a prosperous cattle operation of some 23,000 acres, shipping stock to eastern and foreign markets. In 1917 Rosa Allen sold 700 acres to Sinclair Oil for a refinery, and the ranch house was eventually moved to Galveston Bay to become an Episcopal camp.

Allen, TX

The Allen Water Station traces its roots to an 1848 railroad charter obtained by former Republic of Texas Attorney General Ebenezer Allen, whose line became the Houston & Texas Central. When the H&TC reached Denison in 1873 it completed the first all-rail route linking Texas to St. Louis and the East, and in 1874 the company built a stone dam and water station here to supply its steam locomotives. Worked by American, Irish, German, and Swiss laborers, the station spawned the town of Allen and served until diesels replaced steam in the mid-twentieth century.

Houston, TX

This bend of Buffalo Bayou was Houston's first port, where in January 1837 the steamer Laura tied up and began the ocean-going trade the Allen brothers had envisioned when they founded the city. Though shallow and winding, the bayou made Houston 'the head of navigation' and drew steamers and sailing vessels to its natural turning basin. Generations of dredging, from the 1910 'Houston Plan' onward, deepened the channel into one of the nation's great seaports.

Allentown, PA · est. 1947

Allentown was laid out in 1762 by William Allen, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant and chief justice of colonial Pennsylvania, and was known as Northampton until 1834. Its most storied moment came in 1777, when patriots spirited the Liberty Bell out of Philadelphia ahead of the advancing British and hid it here, while the town also sheltered wounded Continental soldiers. Incorporated as a city in 1867, Allentown went on to thrive as a center of textiles and cement.

Whitehall, PA · est. 1947

Laid out in 1762 by the powerful colonial jurist William Allen, this Lehigh Valley town spent its first seventy years known as Northampton before taking its founder's name. In the anxious autumn of 1777, as the British occupied Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell was spirited here for safekeeping and Revolutionary wounded were nursed in the town. It grew through the 19th century into a humming center of textiles and cement, earning its city charter in 1867.

South Whitehall Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded in 1762 by the colonial leader and jurist William Allen, this town went by the name Northampton until 1834. During the Revolution its distance from the Delaware made it a safe haven — the Liberty Bell was hidden here in 1777 and wounded Continental soldiers were treated nearby. Chartered as a city in 1867, it became a long-lived hub of textile mills and cement works.

South Whitehall Township, PA · est. 1947

William Allen, a leading colonial jurist, established this settlement in 1762; it answered to the name Northampton until 1834. In 1777 it sheltered the Liberty Bell from advancing British forces and hosted Revolutionary wounded. Incorporated as a city in 1867, it flourished as a center of textiles and cement manufacture.

Kilgore, TX

These twin Allis-Chalmers reciprocating pumps stand as relics of Kilgore's transformation into an oil boomtown after the Lou Della Crim No. 1 well blew in on December 28, 1930, opening the vast East Texas field. Brought here in 1931 by the Shell Pipe Line Corporation to push crude toward Houston-area refineries, the pumps ran until 1985 and are estimated to have moved over a billion barrels.

Elwood, TX

Ransom Allphin came from Illinois to Texas with his parents in 1829 and secured this land through an 1835 Mexican land grant, farming and running a grist mill on the frontier. In 1854, while digging a well, he struck clay and soapstone, abandoned the shaft, and donated five acres as a community burial ground—becoming its first grave that same year. Later burials, many from the 1918 influenza epidemic, layer generations of local history into the plot.

Houston, TX

In 1892 Illinois investors bought land near an old railroad line and platted the town of Almeda, marketing it as a citrus-farming community. When severe freezes killed the citrus dream, farmers turned to dairying by the 1920s and Almeda grew into a prosperous dairy town, with a school district that drew children from parts of three counties. The city of Houston absorbed Almeda in 1959, but its name and story endure in local memory.

Morris Township, NJ

Alnwick Hall is a Gilded Age country estate built in the Morristown area, a district that became a favored retreat for the era's industrial and financial elite. Its patron was a prominent New Jersey attorney and an early director of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, tying the house to the rise of the nation's telecommunications giant. The mansion's design deliberately evokes the towers and stonework of an English medieval castle.

Brownsville, TX

Spanish-born merchant Manuel Alonso built a one-story residence on this Brownsville site in 1877 and added a two-story mercantile by 1890, whose 'Los Dos Cañones' store became a favorite local gathering place. The complex shows French and Spanish influences in its New Orleans-style cast-iron porch, French windows, and corbelled brickwork. It again served as a fine-goods store from 1925 to 1944, remaining in the Alonso family until that year.

Santa Fe, TX

Named with the Spanish for "high land," Alta Loma rose on the gently swelling ground of inland Galveston County. In 1893 an investment company platted a townsite along a Santa Fe rail line and installed water, electric, and telephone systems to draw settlers, many of whom planted orchards and truck farms. Battered by the great 1900 storm, the town rebuilt and thrived on farming and dairying before its residents drifted toward Texas City's oil jobs; in 1978 it merged with Arcadia to form the city of Santa Fe.

Port Isabel, TX

Rising in 1931 as Port Isabel's first true apartment building, the Alta Vista brought a touch of Mediterranean Revival elegance—stucco walls, arched porches, and a red tile roof—to a small Gulf Coast fishing and shipping town. Built for the Gaskill-Hodgson Company, it packed nine varied units into two stories at a moment when the Rio Grande Valley was courting tourists and new residents. That it still stands after decades of hurricanes is part of its distinction.

Corpus Christi, TX

Colonel E. H. Ropes swept into Corpus Christi in 1888 with grand schemes—a deepwater port, a railroad to the Rio Grande Valley, and a fashionable suburb called the Cliffs. The three-story, 106-room Alta Vista Hotel was the centerpiece of that dream, designed by young San Antonio architect James Riely Gordon. But Ropes's eastern backers withdrew, and the hotel, finished about 1893, never truly opened; after brief use and long abandonment, it burned in 1927.

Anacortes, WA

This memorial in Anacortes honors the crews of two local crab boats, the Americus and the Altair, lost in February 1983 in one of the deadliest disasters in American commercial fishing. Both Anacortes-based vessels capsized in the icy waters off Alaska, and none of the men aboard survived. Anacortes has long been a fishing port, and the tragedy struck deep in a close-knit maritime community.

Altoona, PA · est. 1947

Altoona was born of the railroad, laid out in 1849 as the mountain-base terminal from which the Pennsylvania Railroad pushed its tracks westward over the daunting Allegheny front. Within a generation the town's yards and shops made it one of the great railroading centers of the nation. In 1867 it hosted a War Governors' Conference, one of several wartime and postwar gatherings that made the city a meeting ground for state leaders.

Amarillo, TX

When the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad pushed through the Panhandle in 1887, Colorado City merchants led by J. T. Berry platted Amarillo to serve their South Plains trade, and cowboys elected it the seat of newly organized Potter County. Ranchers J. F. Glidden and H. B. Sanborn of the Frying Pan Ranch soon lured residents to a new townsite addition, and from 1892 to 1897 Amarillo was the nation's largest rural cattle-shipping point. Sanborn's maneuvering to win a key rail junction in 1898 sealed the town's future as the commercial center of the Texas Panhandle.

Amarillo, TX

In 1925, as the Texas Panhandle boomed on cattle, wheat, and a fresh wave of Amarillo homebuilding, a local real estate firm and the city's evening newspaper teamed up to build a showpiece "dream house." Regionally noted architect Guy Carlander gave it a steeply gabled Tudor Revival silhouette meant to advertise the skill of local craftsmen and the wares of area building-supply houses. The Amarillo Globe ran a running account of the construction, urging readers to drive out and inspect its modern materials and furnishings, and the Radey family made it a home into the 1970s.

Amarillo, TX

Run by the U.S. Bureau of Mines, this plant was the first to tap the vast helium reserves beneath the Texas Panhandle, extracting the gas by liquefying natural gas at temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero. From 1929 to 1943 it supplied almost all the world's helium, operating around the clock, while an adjoining research center studied the gas's production and uses. Panhandle fields and their extensions hold the great majority of the world's known helium, a resource vital to aviation, welding, low-temperature science, and later nuclear and space programs.

Amarillo, TX

This market grew up to serve ranching, the Texas Panhandle's first permanent industry, in a region transformed between 1874 and 1878 as Native peoples were forced out, buffalo herds destroyed, and cattle ranches established. Longhorns were once trailed to Dodge City, but the railroad's arrival in 1887 made Amarillo the nation's largest rural cattle shipping point. The Western Stockyards, founded in 1904, evolved into the Amarillo Livestock Auction, which opened in 1935 and grew into one of the country's busiest cattle auctions.

Amarillo, TX

Organized fairs and horse races drew crowds to the Amarillo area as early as the 1890s, and the Panhandle State Fair took shape in 1913 before World War I suspended it. Amarillo was chosen as the permanent home for a regional fair in 1921, and the Amarillo Tri-State Exposition was chartered in 1923 with participants from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Interrupted again by World War II, it reopened to record crowds in 1947 and now draws roughly 200,000 visitors a year.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 2007

Amedeo Obici arrived in America at twelve, an Italian immigrant with no English, and worked a fruit-store counter before rolling out his own peanut cart on the streets of Wilkes-Barre. In 1906 he and fellow immigrant Mario Peruzzi founded the Planters Peanut Company, and Obici's knack for new roasting and processing methods turned a humble snack into a national brand. Planters' monocled Mr. Peanut became one of the most recognized trademarks in the country, and the company ran its headquarters from Wilkes-Barre from 1925 to 1961.

Menallen Township, PA · est. 2017

In 1817, in the iron-rich hills of Fayette County, ironmaster Isaac Meason and Welsh craftsman Thomas Lewis brought a technique from Wales that would transform American metalmaking. Their puddling furnace and rolling mill burned the carbon out of brittle pig iron to yield tough, workable wrought iron in a single step, making the metal far cheaper and more plentiful just as the young republic began to build with it. The skilled "puddlers" who mastered the roaring furnaces later organized in Pittsburgh as the Sons of Vulcan, an ancestor of today's United Steelworkers.

Hellam Township, PA · est. 1947

In the 1820s, iron was an exotic material for shipbuilding, when nearly every hull afloat was made of wood. Yet in York, machinist John Elgar built the "Codorus," an iron-hulled steamboat, and launched it onto the Susquehanna on November 22, 1825. Named for a nearby creek, the little vessel is remembered as the first iron steamboat built in the United States.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2001

In 1840 John Wagner carried lager yeast from Bavaria to Philadelphia and brewed what is remembered as the first true lager beer in the United States. Unlike the heavier ales then common, lager was cold-fermented and crisp, and it caught on quickly as waves of German immigrants brought both a taste for it and the skill to make it. Their breweries multiplied through the 19th century, helping build one of America's great industries.

Sierra Blanca, TX

At Sierra Blanca in 1881, two rival railroads racing across the desert finally met, completing the nation's second transcontinental line and its long-sought southern route. Rather than build competing tracks, Jay Gould of the Texas & Pacific and Collis P. Huntington of the Southern Pacific struck a deal here to join their lines into one continuous road to the Pacific. Through service began that December, decades after statesmen like Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun first championed the idea in Congress.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 2016

By 1871 the anthracite fields of northeastern Pennsylvania powered much of American industry, but mining remained deadly and technically primitive. That year twenty-two mining professionals met at the Wyoming Valley Hotel in Wilkes-Barre to found the American Institute of Mining Engineers, one of the nation's first engineering societies, aimed at improving safety, training, and technology. From that meeting grew an organization that today counts well over a hundred thousand members worldwide.

Galveston, TX

American National Insurance Company was founded in 1905 by Galveston businessman W. L. Moody, Jr., opening on the third floor of the Moody Building with a home-office staff of just ten. Under Moody's leadership across half a century it grew steadily, passing a billion dollars of life insurance in force by 1943 and climbing into the multibillions. By the early 1970s it employed more than a thousand people and operated across the nation and beyond from a new twenty-story tower.

Gainesville, TX

The colorful two-toned horses celebrated here descend from mounts brought by Spanish conquistadors and became a beloved staple of the western frontier under names like Paint, Pinto, and Piebald. Though largely shut out of North American breed registries in the early 20th century, sixteen dedicated horse enthusiasts met at Gainesville's Curtwood Motel on February 16, 1962, to found a registry of their own. Within a year they had registered 250 horses, and after a 1965 merger the American Paint Horse Association grew into the world's second-largest equine breed association.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2001

In the fall of 1852, pharmacists from eight states gathered in Philadelphia to found what became the American Pharmaceutical Association, an early attempt to bring order and standards to a trade where the purity of drugs was often anyone's guess. Among the founders was William Proctor, Jr., a Philadelphia druggist and teacher later honored as the "Father of American Pharmacy." Their goal was practical and urgent: to ensure that medicines reaching the public were both safe and honestly made.

Marcus Hook, PA · est. 2002

At Marcus Hook, the American Viscose Company became the first firm in North America to manufacture rayon, the pioneering artificial fiber, on a commercial scale. To house its workforce — many of them women — the company built Viscose Village between 1912 and 1915, a planned community in the English Domestic Revival style designed by the Philadelphia firm of Ballinger and Perrot. The plant's fibers went on to serve countless military uses in both World Wars.

Corsicana, TX

Founded in Kansas in 1890 by Horace Greeley Johnston and Charles Rittersbacher, this firm began as a water-well drilling business before the partners moved to Corsicana. In 1894, while drilling for water on South 12th Street, they struck crude oil—the accidental discovery of the Corsicana oil field. The company went on to manufacture rotary drilling equipment, converted to munitions work in World War II, and finally closed under Bethlehem Steel in 1959.

West Columbia, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1810, Ammon Underwood came to Texas in 1834 after a young life of odd jobs, two shipwrecks, and wandering exploration. He fought in the 1835 Siege of Bexar during the Texas Revolution, then settled at West Columbia, where he ran a thriving mercantile business for fifty years and counted Republic of Texas president Anson Jones among his close friends. He lost a cotton fortune during the Civil War but later served in the state legislature.

Fort Worth, TX

Amon G. Carter rose from a hardscrabble Wise County boyhood and odd jobs to become the most influential booster Fort Worth ever had. As publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram — the largest-circulation paper in Texas for decades — he wielded the press, the new medium of radio (WBAP), and a fortune in oil to promote his city and all of West Texas. An aviation enthusiast, he helped lure the aircraft industry to the area, and he poured his wealth into philanthropy, notably founding the Amon Carter Museum.

Frankfort, KY

Massachusetts native Amos Kendall (1789–1869) migrated to Kentucky in 1814, tutored in Henry Clay's household, and edited Frankfort's Argus of Western America. Turning from Clay to Andrew Jackson, he helped carry Kentucky in 1828, followed Jackson to Washington as a trusted "Kitchen Cabinet" adviser and postmaster general, then grew wealthy as Samuel F. B. Morse's telegraph agent and helped found the school that became Gallaudet College.

Cooper, TX

In 1875 the four Hobbs brothers left Mississippi for the Big Creek Thicket, where a settlement called Hobbs Thicket grew up around a two-room schoolhouse. When storekeeper Robert Nickolson sought a post office in 1894, the Postal Service rejected "Hobbs" and named the town "Amy" instead. Amy flourished into the 1920s with a store, gin, and churches, but the 1924 loss of its cotton gin began a decline that emptied the town, leaving only a homecoming tradition among former residents.

Graham, TX

Irish quarrymen cut the stone for this handsome Victorian bank, raised in 1890 near the home of bank director L. J. Bower. Its fine masonry and woodwork lent dignity to the Graham courthouse square, with an abstract firm and land office upstairs. Drought across its North Texas and Indian Territory trade area helped sink the bank in 1895, after which the building served as a retail store for decades.

Monroe City, TX

The prolific Anahuac field was brought in on March 3, 1935, when Humble Oil & Refining's A.D. Middleton No. 1 struck oil in a highly faulted salt-dome structure beneath the rice and grazing lands of Chambers County. A company camp housed the crews who developed the field, which reached peak output during World War II — nearly 12 million barrels in 1944 alone. Over its life the field yielded more than 177 million barrels of oil and hundreds of billions of cubic feet of gas.

Houston, TX

After the Civil War, African Americans in Houston were routinely denied insurance and loans, so in 1882 Jamaican immigrant and educator Henry Cohen Hardy founded the Ancient Order of Pilgrims to provide burial insurance and real estate credit to the city's Black population. The fraternal order spread through local chapters called sanctuaries, and by 1926 built the four-story Pilgrim Temple, a triangular brick landmark that also housed the Negro Chamber of Commerce, the Houston Defender newspaper, beauty and drug businesses, and a ballroom used by Black clubs and schools. For four decades the temple was a hub of Black Houston's civic and economic life before the order faded and the building was razed.

Bensalem Township, PA · est. 2001

Andalusia was the country estate of Nicholas Biddle (1786–1844), a poet, lawyer, state senator, and agriculturalist best remembered as president of the Second Bank of the United States. His fierce contest with President Andrew Jackson over the Bank's control of the nation's money became one of the defining political battles of the age. Designed with help from architects Benjamin H. Latrobe and Thomas U. Walter, the house blends Regency and Greek Revival styles and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1966.

Palestine, TX

Long before public welfare systems, counties cared for their destitute on "poor farms," where residents worked the land in exchange for shelter. Anderson County bought property for one in 1884, building housing, storage barns, a cotton gin, and a canning operation, plus a jail for convict laborers who worked the farm and county roads. Today only the ruins of wells and a cemetery of 75 to 100 graves mark the site.

Bedford, PA · est. 1951

Built in 1815 as the young republic's commerce reached the mountains, the Anderson House gave Bedford its first bank: the Allegheny Bank of Pennsylvania occupied the east room from 1815 to 1832, and its original vault can still be seen. After its banking days the building found a lasting second act, serving since 1924 as the town's public library and community center. It marks the arrival of formal finance in a once-remote frontier town.

Houston, TX

Founded in Oklahoma City in 1904 by the Anderson brothers and their Clayton in-laws, this cotton firm moved to Houston in 1916 and built a sprawling shipping complex on the new Houston Ship Channel. From its perch in the Houston Cotton Exchange, the company grew into a global cotton trader with more than 24,000 employees before diversifying into foods and textiles and finally being absorbed by Quaker Oats in 1986. Its partners left an outsized mark: the M.D. Anderson Foundation seeded the Texas Medical Center, and Will Clayton helped shape the postwar Marshall Plan.

Leander, TX

Thomas Anderson, a Pennsylvania native, built this mill in 1863 in the Texas Hill Country, and during the Civil War it produced gunpowder for the Confederate armies. Small backcountry works like this one helped a South cut off from imported munitions supply its troops from local resources. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Stonewall, TX

German immigrants Andreas and Frederike Lindig reached Texas in 1869 and by 1874 had established a 448-acre farmstead of house, summer kitchen, barn, well, and commercial lime kiln in the Hill Country near Stonewall. Andreas built a log farmhouse from native post oak, added limestone shed rooms, and raised cash crops of peanuts, sweet potatoes, and cotton while his sons built homes nearby. The family held the land until 1980, and the founders rest in a nearby family cemetery.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1996

Andrew Carnegie arrived from Scotland as a poor immigrant boy and rose to become the steel magnate whose Pittsburgh mills helped power America's industrial age. Preaching a "Gospel of Wealth" that held the rich were duty-bound to give their fortunes away, he funded more than 2,500 libraries and endowed institutions devoted to education and world peace. His philanthropy reshaped access to books and learning across the country and beyond.

Sherman, TX

Andrew Hanson, born in Schleswig-Holstein and emigrating to America in 1872, reached Texas in 1878 and the next year opened Sherman's first bakery. Over 35 years he built the Star Bakery into a local institution, introducing the town's first delivery service and its first commercially made ice cream. His parents and brothers followed him from Denmark, and the family settled permanently in Sherman.

Austin, TX

Andrew Jackson Zilker arrived in Austin penniless in 1876 and rose to become a businessman and bank director in the booming capital of a young state. Shaped by watching laborers toil along the Ohio River, he championed "practical" education, and when he sold 366 acres including Barton Springs to the city, he steered the payments to the local schools. His gifts of parkland became Zilker Park, still Austin's most beloved green space.

Greeneville, TN

Before he was president, Andrew Johnson was a tailor, and in the 1830s he ran his own shop in Greeneville, stitching clothes while teaching himself to read and to argue. That original tailor shop survives, sheltered within the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site alongside a museum that traces his unlikely climb from working tradesman to the White House. It is a rare, tangible link to the humble craft that launched a president.

Lockhart, TX

A Tennessee-born settler, Andrew Lee Brock came to Caldwell County in 1848 and started married life on a Boggy Creek parcel gifted by his father-in-law, raising a log cabin and working cotton, grain, and a cotton gin. As his family and fortunes grew, he turned to shaping Lockhart itself, raising livestock and financing a dozen commercial buildings in the town's business district — many still standing today.

Andrews County, TX

In December 1929 the Deep Rock Oil Company brought in the C. E. Ogden No. 1, a well producing 200 barrels a day from the San Andres lime formation—the discovery well of Andrews County and the first of 730 wells in the Fuhrman-Mascho field. Purchased by the Tripplehorn brothers of Fort Worth in 1932, it kept pumping for decades. By the mid-1960s Andrews had become the top oil-producing county in Texas and the nation, having yielded more than a billion barrels.