Waurika, Oklahoma

Henry A. Whaley, the first permanent settler in Clay County, was born near Washington in Rhea County, Tennessee, on August 24, 1826. He received little formal education. During the Mexican War he enlisted in the United States Army at Washington, Tennessee, and served in Company H of the First Regiment of the Tennessee Mounted Infantry, commanded by Capt. James W. Gillespie. Whaley saw no combat in the war with Mexico but did serve with the occupation forces at Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico, after the capture of the city by the army of Gen. Zachary Taylor . By the time of his honorable discharge, Whaley had attained the rank of sergeant. He returned to Tennessee and became engaged in farming and ranching. On November 29, 1849, he was married to Annanellie Melhellen at Strawberry Plains in Rhea County, Tennessee; the couple had one son. Whaley and his wife did not live together after 1860, though a divorce was apparently never obtained. Whaley moved to Texas in 1860 and settled near Gainesville in Cooke County; there he farmed and ranched. With the outbreak of the Civil War , he enlisted in the frontier defense regiment commanded by Col. James G. Bourland . Serving in Company B of the regiment, Whaley saw combat in several campaigns against the Indians. By the end of the Civil War he held the rank of second lieutenant in the army of the Confederate States of America. In 1869 Whaley settled in northern Clay County, about four miles southeast of the mouth of the Big Wichita River. At that time he was the only White settler in Clay County. Whaley constructed a stockade and hired about a dozen employees to farm, care for livestock, and provide protection against the numerous Indians who frequented the area. He was soon selling several thousand bushels of oats annually. His principal buyer was the United States Army. Although he worked hard on his land for nearly thirty years and made huge amounts of money, he was alone and a virtual pauper during the last years of his life. He lost most of his land because of his weakness for alcoholic beverages. By the end of his life Whaley was subsisting on a pension of eight dollars a month granted on the basis of his service in the Mexican War. He died on December 26, 1898, and was buried in the Benvanue Cemetery, three miles east of Byers in Clay County.

Byers is at the intersection of State Highway 79 and Farm Road 171, two miles south of the conjunction of the Red and Wichita rivers, fourteen miles north of Henrietta, and twenty miles northeast of Wichita Falls in northern Clay County. It was founded by two brothers, Anthony Walter and George Washington Byers, who were partners in a general store in Sherman and acquired over 30,000 acres of land in Clay County. There are several versions of how they acquired the land. One is that Mr. Acers, a large landowner in the area, bought barbed wire on credit with his land as collateral, and when he was unable to pay off his debt the land was forfeited to the Byers brothers. The other story is that the Byerses traded their mercantile business in Sherman for the land in Clay County. The real establishment of Byers occurred in 1904, when the Wichita Falls and Oklahoma Railway was completed from Wichita Falls to Byers. The brothers donated $15,000 of the $27,924 raised for the completion of the line. They subdivided their ranch, laid out town lots, and established the Tree Ranch. Because the railroad went three miles west of Benvanue, many of the residents moved their homes and businesses to Byers to have access to the railroad, which was completed through the community in June of 1904. Town lots went on sale on June 10. That year Byers received a post office with A. Harris, the owner of the first store in town, as postmaster. In 1905 Edgar P. Haney established the community's first newspaper, the Byers Searchlight , to promote the community, its school, and the "Searchlight Town Band." By 1906 Byers was a sizable town. Its school had 115 pupils and two teachers, and the town had its first cotton gin. In 1914 the community had a population of 600, the First National Bank, a weekly newspaper named the Byers Herald , several cotton gins, cattle breeders and livestock dealers, and cotton buyers. In addition, a variety of stores included furniture dealers, jewelers, grocery and dry goods establishments, and a blacksmith. The population of Byers remained steady throughout the 1920s, but by the 1930s it began to drop. The town was incorporated by 1940. It had a population of 427 and thirty businesses shortly before World War II . In 1943 the Wichita Falls and Oklahoma Railway was abandoned. By the 1980s twelve businesses remained in Byers. In 1980 and 1990 the population was 510. In 2000 the population was 517. Byers was one of the five school districts in Clay County; in 1990 its school had 136 students.

The Wichita Falls and Oklahoma Railway Company was chartered on October 23, 1903, to build a road twenty miles from Wichita Falls to a point in the northwest corner of Clay County on the south bank of the Red River, near the mouth of Cache Creek. The company had a capital of $50,000, and the business office was located at Wichita Falls. Members of the first board of directors included Joseph Alexander Kemp, Robert E. Huff , A. Newby, O. J. Kendall, O. T. Bacon, G. B. Stone, Frank Aris, William McGregor, and H. M. Durrett, all from Wichita Falls. The Wichita Falls and Oklahoma was the first of a group of feeders that the Colorado and Southern built for the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway. Twenty-two miles of track was built from Wichita Falls to Byers, Texas, and placed in service on June 24, 1904. The road received $28,000 in bonuses, of which the Byers family, for whom the Texas terminal was named, gave $15,000. Construction began in June 1922 on an extension from Byers to a connection with the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific at Waurika, Oklahoma. This extension, built under the charter of the Wichita Falls and Oklahoma Railroad of Oklahoma, was placed in operation March 1, 1923. Both the Texas and the Oklahoma companies were operated by the Wichita Valley Railway under lease. The entire line was abandoned on October 19, 1942, and the track removed the following year.

Land given to found school (first in north Clay County) by A. W. and G. W. Byers. First superintendent Edgar Haney, later legislator, promoted first independent school district laws. Rufus Rush, first graduate, later taught President Lyndon B. Johnson. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1967.

The Petrolia oilfield, near Petrolia in Clay County, was named for an oil-producing town in Pennsylvania. In 1904 oil was discovered at the site. Though the field never produced large quantities of oil, its shallow depth lessened drilling expenses and made production profitable. On December 17, 1910, a true gusher blew in; Dorthulia Dunn No. One produced 700 barrels a day from a depth of 1,600 feet. The field reached peak oil production in 1914, when 550,585 barrels were taken. Afterward, production declined rapidly, and the discovery of oil at Electra and Burkburnett overshadowed activities at Petrolia. Drilling continued, however, as the field turned out to hold the largest known reserve of natural gas in the state. The first gas well was brought in on May 5, 1907, from a depth of 1,410 feet. Edwy R. Brown began pumping gas to nearby cities and by 1913 was serving Dallas, Fort Worth, and twenty-one other towns. To manage his growing business, Brown formed the Lone Star Gas Company in 1909. The gas Brown pumped to nearby towns contained .1 percent helium. In 1915 the United States Army built the first helium extraction plant in the country at Petrolia, and for several years the field was the sole source of helium for the country. Helium gas production decreased after World War I , and the field ceased operations completely in 1921, when a better source was discovered north of Amarillo.

Petrolia is at the crossing of State highways 79 and 148, fourteen miles north of Henrietta and fifteen miles east of Wichita Falls in northern Clay County. The establishment of the community dates from 1904, when the Wichita Falls and Oklahoma Railway was built through the area. The site was named Petrolia after a town in Pennsylvania because of the nearby oilfields. The original community in the area was called Oil City. In 1901 J. W. Lochridge, a farmer and rancher with land three miles southeast of the site of present Petrolia, hired Samuel McCord to dig a water well, but he was unable to find water and struck oil at a depth of 263 feet, thus opening the first oilfield in North Texas. Lochridge used the oil for dipping cattle to rid them of parasites, and on April 10, 1903, formed the Lochridge Oil Company. Speculators who had held the mineral rights to the area since the Civil War flooded the area. A shantytown of several hundred residents grew up in the area, which became known as Oil City. It had its own post office from June 25, 1904, to July 19, 1905. When the Wichita Falls and Oklahoma Railroad went through the area in 1904 the majority of the population moved to Petrolia, which was located on the railroad, and Petrolia received its own post office in 1904. By late 1905 Petrolia was a booming town, with a hotel, a bank, a drugstore, a barbershop, a livery stable, a dry-goods store, a hardware store, a furniture store, a meat market, a lumberyard, an ice house, two oilfield-supply stores, and cotton gins. The sale of alcoholic beverages was illegal in Clay County, but alcohol was freely sold on the streets of early Petrolia. Prostitution and gambling were rampant. The community continued to grow, especially with the discovery of natural gas in the field in 1907. By 1914 the community had churches of five communions, the Continental State Bank, a theater, a water works, telephone connections, and a newspaper, the Petrolia Enterprise . The population was 517. Petrolia reached its highest population, 914, in the mid-1920s and was incorporated by 1930. Afterward, the population dropped to its nadir, 597, in the 1940s, when it had twenty businesses. In 1943 the Wichita Falls and Oklahoma Railway tracks were abandoned, and Petrolia no longer had a railroad. After World War II the population began to rise slowly. It reached 762 in the early 1990s, when Petrolia was the second largest town in Clay County. In the 1980s eleven businesses operated in the community, but no manufacturers. In 1990 Petrolia was one of the five school districts in Clay County. Its one school had 434 students, of which 97 percent were White and 3 percent Hispanic. In 2000 the population was 782.