Sell Mineral Rights in Gregg County, Texas

Rusk County got the discovery well. Gregg County got the boom, a town of five hundred people that became a forest of steel in eighteen months, and a single downtown block that held the greatest concentration of oil derricks the world has ever seen.

December 28, 1930

Dad Joiner's well down in Rusk County was interesting. The Lou Della Crim No. 1, brought in by Ed Bateman just south of Kilgore in Rusk County on December 28, 1930, was something else: 22,000 barrels a day. Seventy times the discovery well.

Four weeks later the Lathrop No. 1 came in north of Longview at 320 barrels an hour. Three wells, thirty miles apart, all enormous. Whatever was underneath was not a pool. It was a single reservoir covering 140,000 acres, and Gregg County sat in the middle of it.

Five hundred people to twelve thousand

Kilgore had about a thousand residents in 1929. By the middle of 1930, with the Depression on, it was under five hundred. The town was dying.

By 1936 it had twelve thousand people. It incorporated in February 1931 for the straightforward reason that somebody had to run the place.

Eleven hundred wells inside the city limits

Because the field sat directly under the town, the town got drilled. At the height of it there were more than 1,100 producing wells within the Kilgore city limits, in yards, behind storefronts, between houses.

On part of one downtown block stood the densest cluster of derricks anywhere on earth. They called it the World's Richest Acre, and you can still stand on it; the city has put commemorative derricks back up on the spot.

What town-lot drilling did to ownership

This is the part that still shows up in the records.

When a field is drilled under farmland, the tracts are large and the ownership is relatively simple. When it is drilled under a town, the tracts are lots, quarter-acre, eighth-acre, subdivided again and again. Every one of those lots carried a mineral interest. Every one got leased in a hurry. Many were split among heirs before the wells were even finished.

The result is that Gregg County has some of the most finely divided mineral ownership in Texas. Interests measured in ten-thousandths of a royalty are ordinary here. And the population that owned them did not stay, Longview and Kilgore both exported people for two generations. A great many Gregg County mineral owners now live in Dallas, Houston, or out of state entirely, and have never seen the lot their interest sits under.

Martial law came here too

By mid-1931 the field was making 900,000 barrels a day and crude had collapsed from ninety-nine cents to thirteen cents a barrel. On August 17, 1931, Governor Ross Sterling ordered the National Guard and the Rangers in to shut the field down. Soldiers camped in the Gregg County oil field for months.

The numbers

Gregg County has produced more than 3.28 billion barrels of oil. County population nearly quadrupled in a decade, from 15,778 in 1930 to 58,027 in 1940.

The county still produced over three million barrels in 2004, and the Cotton Valley gas section underneath the old Woodbine oil is being worked today by Sabine Energy and Craton Operating.

What to know if you own here

• Your fraction is probably small and that does not mean it is worthless. Gregg interests are tiny by design because the lots were tiny. They have also been producing for ninety years.
• The lease is almost certainly from 1931 and has no Pugh clause. The shallow well holds everything below it.
• The chain probably runs through a town lot, not a farm. That means a plat, a subdivision, and often a city block description rather than a survey call, a different research problem, and one most buyers do not want to do.