Name: Kilgore, Texas
Address: Kilgore, TX

The World's Richest Acre RoadyGoat

When the boom hit Kilgore, it hit downtown. There were no spacing rules yet, no laws about how far apart wells had to be, so people drilled wherever they could buy or lease a scrap of land, even the lots between storefronts. Things got so crowded that one roughly one-acre block in the middle of town ended up holding around two dozen oil wells, their derricks crammed together so tightly the legs practically overlapped. It became the most densely drilled patch of ground anywhere on Earth. People started calling it the World's Richest Acre, and the name stuck. You can still go stand on the spot today, where a few restored derricks mark just how unbelievably packed it once was. It's a perfect snapshot of a boom moving faster than anyone could regulate it, when the rush to reach the oil first turned a downtown block into a forest of steel.

The Old Wildcatter Who Struck the Big One RoadyGoat

1930

On October 3, 1930, an aging, nearly broke wildcatter named Columbus Marion Joiner, who everyone called Dad, brought in a well known as the Daisy Bradford No. 3. And it almost didn't happen. He had already drilled two dry holes on the same farm and was running out of money, hope, and time. Then the third hole came in. What old Dad Joiner had stumbled into was the East Texas Oil Field, the largest oil field in the lower 48 states. It was a staggering, almost unbelievable amount of oil sitting under quiet farmland. Tiny, sleepy Kilgore boomed practically overnight. People poured in by the thousands, derricks went up everywhere you looked, and a small farm town turned into one of the wildest oil booms in American history. All of it traces back to one stubborn old man who refused to quit after two failures and drilled one more time.

Thousands of Wells, One Giant Pool RoadyGoat

Here's the surprise that took people years to fully understand. All those thousands of East Texas wells, drilled by hundreds of different owners across a huge area, weren't tapping separate pockets of oil. They were all drinking from one single, connected underground reservoir. Picture a vast buried sheet of oil-soaked Woodbine sandstone spread out across five whole counties, one enormous shared pool. Now here's the part that matters. Oil underground naturally sits under pressure, and that pressure is what pushes it up a well to the surface. But when thousands of straws all jab into the same connected pool and start sucking as fast as they can, the pressure drops for absolutely everyone. Your neighbor's frantic pumping quietly weakens your own well. Nobody owned the whole pool, yet everyone was draining it together. Understanding that hidden connection underground turned out to be the key to the entire field's future.

East Texas Oil Field

1930

The discovery of the East Texas Oil Field in 1930 was the largest oil find in American history at the time, producing over 5 billion barrels and transforming Kilgore, Henderson, and Longview.

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Cliburn, Harvey Lavan, Jr. [Van]

1958

Van Cliburn, one of the most prominent American concert pianists of the twentieth century, was born Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Jr., on July 12, 1934, in Shreveport, Louisiana. In 1941 his father, Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Sr., relocated their family to Kilgore, Texas, to work in the exploding East Texas oil industry . His mother, Rildia Bee (O'Bryan) Cliburn , was a gifted pianist-she had studied in Manhattan with Arthur Friedheim, a student of Franz Liszt and Anton Rubinstein-and gave lessons from their home. His mother recognized her son's prodigious aptitude for the keyboard after the three-year-old "Van" imitated a student's performance of Caroline Crawford's Arpeggio Waltz. She immediately began instructing him, and within a short time, he performed at Dodd College in Shreveport. Cliburn quickly achieved a reputation as a musical wunderkind , and he performed widely during his adolescent years in East Texas. In addition to the lessons he received from his mother, he was also able to hear performances by-and meet-legendary concert pianists José Iturbi and Arthur Rubinstein in Kilgore and Dallas. At the age of thirteen, after winning a contest, he played in Carnegie Hall alongside other talented young pianists. Once he graduated from Kilgore High School in 1951, Cliburn entered the renowned Juilliard School of Music, where he studied with Rosina Lhévinne, a distinguished representative of the Russian school of piano expression and technique. During the 1950s he was a rising piano star; he performed across the United States, won a number of prestigious awards, and his hometown of Kilgore declared April 8, 1953, as "Van Cliburn Day." His extraordinary success in piano competitions included first prize in the 1954 Leventritt Competition. Consequently Van Cliburn debuted with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall and became, at age twenty, a Steinway artist. He graduated from Juilliard in 1955 and around that time signed on with Columbia Artist Management. Cliburn's most significant achievement, however, came on April 11, 1958, when he won the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Upon the completion of his final performance (he performed Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto) for the competition, the audience gave him a standing ovation and cheered for more than eight minutes; the judges allowed Cliburn to take a second bow. The Texan pianist's success at the competition was a landmark in the "Thaw," a period of considerable reform in the Soviet Union and the relaxation of tension between the Cold War superpowers. Culture-from music to art to film-was an important part of the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the post- World War II era. Allowing an American to win such an important music competition in the Soviet Union demonstrated Nikita Khrushchev's willingness to break with the extreme censorship and cultural control of Joseph Stalin, his predecessor. For citizens of the United States, it was a major cultural victory, especially after the Soviets' recent launch of Sputnik into space. Cliburn's win was an international media sensation, and he was greeted with a ticker tape parade in New York City when he returned. He was featured on the cover of the May 19, 1958, issue of Time magazine as "The Texan Who Conquered Russia." Cliburn, however, did not see himself as a "conqueror" and, upon his return to the United States, published a statement, "There are no political barriers to music. The same blood running through Americans also runs through the Soviet people and compels us to create and enjoy the same art...." From the late 1950s until the mid-1970s, Cliburn was a major force in classical music across the globe. He studied conducting with Bruno Walter, toured across the world and for the U. S. State Department, and his 1958 RCA recording of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 was the first classical recording to sell a million copies and go platinum. It also earned a Grammy for Best Clas

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Davis, Gussie Nell

1940

Gussie Nell Davis, founder of the Kilgore Rangerettes (and therefore of the world-wide dance-drill team movement), daughter of Robert Augustus and Mattie Lavinia (Callaway) Davis, was born in Farmersville, Texas, on November 4, 1906. She attended public schools in Farmersville and, with the intention of becoming a concert pianist, entered the College of Industrial Arts (now Texas Woman's University), Denton, in 1923. She changed her major study to physical education and received a B.A. degree from CIA in 1927 and a M.A. from the University of Southern California in 1938. Miss Davis began her professional career as instructor of physical education and pep-squad director at Greenville High School in 1928. Drawing on her combined experience in music, dance, and physical education, she trained the all-girl "Flaming Flashes" to use small wooden batons that she commissioned from a local furniture maker, as well as flags, various props, drums, and bugles in increasingly complex dance-drills and marches. Although there were several female drum and bugle corps or pep squads performing at football games, the Flaming Flashes were the first twirl-and-dance group. In 1939 when Davis was asked by B. E. Masters, president of Kilgore College, to "find a way to keep people in their seats at halftime" without using drums or bugles, she organized the Kilgore Rangerettes, a precision dance-drill team that performed for the first time in 1940. With the assistance of choreographer Denard Hayden, accompanist Hazel Stewart, long-time sponsor L. N. Crim, and assistants Peggy Coghlan, Barbara Harmon, and Deana Bolton, Miss Davis directed the Rangerettes until her retirement in 1979. The Rangerettes performed for the Lions International Convention in 1940 and gave their first bowl-game appearance at the Little Rose Bowl in 1946. Subsequently, their performances at college and professional games, conventions, and other events have included the Cotton Bowl (annual since 1949, except for 1950), the Sugar Bowl (1950), the All-Star Game (1951-55), President Dwight D. Eisenhower 's Inauguration (1953), the International Rotary Convention (1959), the Pecan Bowl (1966), the Shrine Bowl (1966), Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (1967-69), the National Convention of Chambers of Commerce of Venezuela (1973), the American Fortnight in Hong Kong (1975), various engagements in Romania (1977), and the annual Rangerette Revels (since 1943). The Rangerettes have been cover girls on numerous publications, including Esquire (October 1950), Look (August 4, 1959), Saturday Evening Post (October 5, 1963), Life (numerous times), and Newsweek (December 12, 1977). They have been the subject of articles in such diverse publications as the American Weekly (November 22, 1953), the Paris Match (February 29, 1964), Family Weekly (December 27, 1964), Southern Living (January 1967), Sports Illustrated (December 16, 1974), Texas Star (November 14, 1971), Texas Woman (February 1979), and Texas Highways (January 1981). They have appeared on the "Ed Sullivan Show" (1952) and "60 Minutes" (1971), and in such movies as Cinerama's Seven Wonders of the World (1956). All-American and sportscaster Red Grange dubbed the Rangerettes "Sweethearts of the Nation's Gridirons" (1950). The Ice Capades designed a 1973 show around the young women, who wear white Western hats, belts, and boots, red tops, and "flippy" blue skirts, all parts of a copyrighted costume. The Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston spotlighted the group in 1977 as a "living art form." With Irving Dreibrodt, retired director of the SMU Mustang Band, Davis founded American Drill Team Schools, Incorporated, which has provided instruction for drill teams across the United States. In addition to serving on the Kilgore College Staff (1939-79), Davis was a consultant to drill teams, a judge of drill-team competitions, a member of the National Drill Team Directors Association and Rangerettes Forever, and a member of the board of directors of F

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Kilgore - Forest of Derricks

1930

During the East Texas oil boom, Kilgore had over 1,100 oil derricks within city limits, including 24 on a single acre of downtown that became known as the World's Richest Acre.

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Kilgore Rangerettes

1940

Founded in 1940 at Kilgore College, the Rangerettes were the first precision dance drill team in the world, invented to keep fans in the stands at halftime.

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Kilgore, TX (Gregg County)

1930

Kilgore is on U.S. Highway 259 and State highways 31, 42, and 135, 120 miles east of Dallas in south central Gregg County. The area was first settled before the Civil War by planters from the old South, but the city was not founded until 1872, when the International-Great Northern Railroad built a line between Longview and Palestine. The railroad bypassed New Danville, and the company platted a new town, which they named for Constantine Buckley Kilgore , who sold the 174-acre townsite to the railroad and urged many of the businesses of New Danville to move there. A post office opened in 1873, and by 1885 Kilgore had two steam gristmill-cotton gins, a church, and a district school; the estimated population was 250. The Kilgore State Bank opened in 1906, and an independent school district was formed in 1910. By 1914 the town had two banks, Baptist and Methodist churches, a newspaper, two cotton gins, several general stores, a drugstore, an ice cream parlor, a hotel, and a reported population of 700. The town reached a population of 1,000 in 1929. But the combined effects of the Great Depression and the decline of cotton, on which the town's economy had largely depended, brought a steep population decline. By the middle of 1930 the number of residents dropped below 500, and many businesses had been forced to close. The discovery of the surrounding East Texas oilfield in the fall of 1930 transformed Kilgore from a declining rural community into a boomtown. Within days thousands streamed into the town, erecting tents and shacks in every available vacant space. Honky-tonk bars sprouted up around the town; schools and other public institutions were overwhelmed. By 1936 the town's population had swelled to 12,000. To deal with the onslaught, the city incorporated in February 1931. Kilgore, located near the geographic center of the oilfield, became an important production, processing, service, and supply hub. Numerous wells were drilled in the city itself, and at the height of the boom there were over 1,100 producing wells within the city limits. On part of one downtown block in the early 1930s stood the greatest concentration of oil derricks in the world; the area came to be known as the "World's Richest Acre." But the huge increase in production caused oil prices to fall precipitously, and in August of 1931 Governor Ross Sterling ordered martial law to control production and bring order to the area. The boom began to subside in the mid-1930s. Major oil companies gradually bought out most of the independents, and by the eve of World War II the boom was largely over, although oil production in the area continues. During the 1950s and 1960s the population stabilized. In 1965 Kilgore had an estimated 10,500 residents and 578 rated businesses. In 1990 the population was 11,066, and in 2000 it reached 11,301. In the early 1990s the town housed a major office of the Oil and Gas Division of the Railroad Commission and the headquarters of various branches of the petroleum industry. The East Texas Oil Museum and Kilgore College, the home of the famed Kilgore Rangerettes , are also located in Kilgore.

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Kilgore, Texas

Music in Kilgore

Songs About Kilgore

Artists From Kilgore

Rivers & Roads in Song near Kilgore

History of Kilgore

The World's Richest Acre RoadyGoat

The Old Wildcatter Who Struck the Big One RoadyGoat

Thousands of Wells, One Giant Pool RoadyGoat

East Texas Oil Field

Cliburn, Harvey Lavan, Jr. [Van]

Davis, Gussie Nell

Kilgore - Forest of Derricks

Kilgore Rangerettes

Kilgore, TX (Gregg County)

Things to Do in Kilgore

Everything Near Kilgore