THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Late Spring 2019 23 TheCoastalBend.com Above— Wells at work at night in the country’s most productive oil producing region, the Permian Basin; Below— A map of natural gas drilling activity in the Continental U.S. shows whyTexas is now the top producer. Charts depicting how the U.S. has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the top crude oil producer, and has surpassed Russia in natural gas, from 2008 to 2017. C orsicana is one of those small Texas cities that everyone has heard of, but few seem to know exactly where it’s at, or much about its significance to the history of the state. In 1894, a crew hired to dig a major water well near the center of town acci- dently struck oil, and within months, prospectors from throughout the country had descended upon the sleepy town, located 55 miles south of Dallas, in search of oil riches in Texas. Although most of those early Corsicana wells produced little more than twenty barrels a day, the discovery led to a boom of exploration as well as the construction of the state’s very first oil refinery. A mining engineer from Louisiana named Capt. A. F. Lucas made the discovery that launched the first Tex- as Oil Boom in the southeast corner of Beaumont known as Spindletop, on January 10, 1901, when the Lucas No. 1 well erupted with a 100-foot high explosion of crude that gushed for nine days before it was finally capped. That first Spindletop well produced over 75,000 barrels of oil per day in January 1901. Production for the entire state was less than 840,000 barrels in 1900—produc- tion in 1901 boomed to 4.4 million barrels, all due to Spindletop, and boomed again to 17.4 million barrels in 1902, with this single field accounting for 94% of all Texas oil produced. Without a doubt, Capt. Lucas’ discovery at Spindletop marked the transformation of the Texas economy from agriculture to petroleum and set the stage for the state’s growth and prosperity for at least the following 120 years—and counting. Joe Cullinan, Pennsylvania native and a former manager for Standard Oil Company, built that first re- finery in Corsicana in 1898, and was quick to jump on the opportunities that came with the Spindletop play in Beaumont. With partner Arnold Schlaet and fund- ing from the colorful, former Texas Governor Jim Hogg, Cullinan formed the Texas Oil Company in Beaumont, with the purpose of refining crude oil into gasoline as well as every conceivable fuel product, and then distrib- uting those products to retailers throughout the Unit- ed States. In 1905 the company relocated to Houston, merging with The Texas Company and forming Texaco, while establishing Houston as the hub for the state’s new and flourishing energy business. As the American auto industry emerged in the first decade of the 20th Century, along with a peak in de- mand from the world’s new, biggest, single buyer of oil-based products, the U.S. military headed into World War I, prospecting and drilling activity exploded in the 1910’s. Major discoveries were happening in just about every corner of the state by the 1920’s—from Wichita County just a few miles from the border with Okla- homa, back to Corsicana and Limestone County south of Dallas, to Eastland County west of Fort Worth and the Panhandle far to the north, and especially in the Gulf region south of Houston, in Brazoria, Fort Bend, and Chambers Counties. South Texas earned its place on the drilling map with hits in Bee and Pettus Counties in the 1920’s.