Sell Mineral Rights in Marion County, Texas

Marion County discovered oil twenty years before the East Texas Field, at a moment when the county badly needed something. It is one of the smaller counties in the district and one of the most finely divided by ownership, and Jefferson is one of the more remarkable towns in Texas.

Jefferson, before the oil

To understand what oil meant here you have to understand what came before it. Jefferson was one of the largest inland ports in Texas, steamboats came up Big Cypress Bayou from the Red River, and the town shipped cotton and received everything the region bought. In the 1870s it was among the busiest commercial towns in the state.

Then the railroads came, routed around it, and the river traffic died. Jefferson went from a boom port to a museum of itself in roughly a decade. The county spent forty years in decline.

1910

Oil was discovered in Marion County in 1910, before Ranger, before the East Texas Field, before most of the discoveries that made Texas an oil state.

The effect was immediate in local terms. By 1920 the county had gained sixty new businesses, eleven of them manufacturing firms. For a county that had been losing everything for four decades, oil speculation was the first good news since the steamboats.

A long, modest production history

Marion County has produced more than 55.6 million barrels of oil since 1910, plus gas, about 181,000 barrels and 4.7 million cubic feet of gas-well gas in 2004 alone. It never became a major producing county. It has simply been producing, without interruption, for a hundred and sixteen years.

What a century of production does to ownership

This is the defining fact about Marion County minerals.

An interest created in 1910 has had time to pass through five generations. In a county this small, with families that largely stayed and then largely left, the result is mineral ownership divided into fractions that are genuinely difficult to trace, and frequently spread across dozens of heirs who have never met.

Rose City Resources and RFE Operating are working the Cotton Valley here now.

What to know if you own here

• Small fractions are normal and not disqualifying. We buy them. Most funds will not bother.
• Expect unprobated estates. A century of informal transfers means heirship affidavits are usually the chain, and they are frequently incomplete.
• If your family holds several small pieces of the same tract, bring them together. Related owners selling as a group is worth more than the same interests sold one at a time.