Sell Mineral Rights in Harrison County, Texas

Harrison County found oil before the East Texas Field existed. Marshall was already an established railroad city with money and lawyers in it when the derricks arrived, which makes this county's history read differently from its neighbors'.

A city that was already something

Marshall was one of the most important towns in nineteenth-century Texas, a railroad hub, the Confederate capital of Missouri during the Civil War, and the seat of a county with real commercial infrastructure. When oil came, it came to a place that already had banks, courts and a business class.

That matters. In Kilgore, oil arrived in a town of five hundred people and overwhelmed it. In Marshall, oil arrived as an addition to an existing economy.

1928

Oil was discovered in Harrison County in 1928, two years before Dad Joiner's well came in southwest of here, and before anyone had reason to think East Texas held one of the world's great oil fields.

Nearly 89 million barrels have been produced since. In 2004 alone the county made about 871,000 barrels of oil and more than 59 million cubic feet of gas-well gas.

The gas era

The oil is the smaller half of this county's story. Harrison sits over a thick Cotton Valley section that has been drilled steadily for decades, and beneath that, the Haynesville.

Harrison is one of the Texas counties named among the primary Haynesville producers, and it was in the early wave of the play after Chesapeake announced it in March 2008, closer to the shallower core than the deep Shelby Trough counties to the south, which is why it was drilled earlier.

Comstock Oil & Gas and Sabine Energy are the operators working here now.

What to know if you own here

• You may have three generations of leases on one tract, a 1930s-era oil lease, a 1980s Cotton Valley lease, and a modern Haynesville lease. Which one covers which depth is the whole question.
• An early-wave Haynesville well is now fifteen-plus years old. Its decline is long past flush and its remaining value is far easier to underwrite than a new well's.
• Marshall's records are good. Harrison County's deed index runs online to 1903, and document images back to 2017, better coverage than most of the district.