Sell Mineral Rights in Nacogdoches County, Texas

Everyone says Spindletop, 1901. Spindletop was thirty-five years late. The first producing oil well in Texas was drilled fifteen miles southeast of Nacogdoches by a merchant named Lyne Barret, and he did it with a steam engine, a cogwheel and a piece of pipe.

Oil Springs before anyone drilled it

There is a place in this county where oil came out of the ground on its own. The Caddo knew it. The Spanish knew it. Settlers were skimming it off pools at Oil Springs by the 1790s, using it to grease wagon axles and as medicine, for man and livestock both. Nobody thought of it as an industry. It was a feature of the land, like a salt lick.

Lyne Taliaferro Barret

Lyne T. Barret (1832–1913) was a store clerk and merchant in Melrose who became convinced the seeps meant something. In 1859 he took a lease at Oil Springs and began a test well. He was two years ahead of the Civil War, which took him away from it entirely.

He came back in 1865 to a defeated economy with no capital in it. On December 21, 1865 he and four partners, Benjamin P. Hollingsworth, Charles A. Hamilton, John T. Flint and John B. Earle, organized the Melrose Petroleum Oil Company.

September 12, 1866

Barret spudded in the summer of 1866. On September 12, 1866, at 106 feet, he brought in the first producing oil well in the state of Texas. It made about ten barrels a day.

He sent samples to New York, where they were judged "superior in all its properties."

The rig he built

Barret did not have a cable-tool rig, which was how everyone in Pennsylvania drilled. So he built something else: an auger fastened to a length of pipe, rotated by a cogwheel driven off a steam engine.

That is the basic principle of rotary drilling, in 1866. It is the same principle every well in this county is drilled with today, including the ones going to seventeen thousand feet in the Haynesville. He was roughly thirty years ahead of the industry, and he got no credit for it in his lifetime.

Why it failed

Everything about the timing was wrong. Oil prices collapsed. Reconstruction-era Texas had no capital, no railroads to speak of in this part of the state, and no market for crude within reach. Barret's backers pulled out. The company folded and he went back to storekeeping.

He kept trying for years to get someone interested in the field again. He died in 1913, twelve years after Spindletop made other men rich, having been first by three and a half decades.

What came after him

In 1867, Amory Q. Starr and Peyton F. Edwards brought in another well at Oil Springs. Several thousand barrels came out of the field in that early period. In 1887 Oil Springs boomed properly, at a settlement they called Oil City.

Texas's first oil field, first pipeline, and first refining attempts all happened in Nacogdoches County. Then the East Texas Field came in a hundred miles north in 1930 and the state's attention left and did not come back for seventy years.

The quiet century, and the Haynesville

Nacogdoches County produced 804 barrels in 1939. Total cumulative oil production through January 1991 was 2,845,929 barrels, about what the East Texas Field made in five days at its peak.

What changed everything was gas, and depth. The Haynesville and Bossier sit below this county, and until horizontal drilling and modern completions arrived after 2008 they were unreachable. EXCO, Apex Natural Gas and Aethon are working them now, with Travis Peak and Cotton Valley production above.

What to know if you own here

• Ownership here was never shattered by a boom. Nacogdoches never had a 1930-style leasing frenzy. Minerals mostly passed down with the family land, which means chains are often cleaner and tracts larger than in the old-field counties.
• The deed index is the oldest in the district, 1837. If your family has been here since the Republic, the paper is here.
• Shallow history and deep value are different questions. A tract with no production history at all can sit over a Haynesville unit. Do not let a hundred and fifty quiet years tell you there is nothing under you.