Name: Ranger, Texas
Address: Ranger, TX

The Camp That Named the Town RoadyGoat

You're in Ranger, Texas, so here's the ranger tangent behind the name: Texas Rangers camped nearby during the eighteen seventies, and Ranger Camp Valley preserved their presence. When the railroad arrived a few miles west in eighteen eighty, residents moved toward the tracks and carried Ranger into the permanent town name. Ranger sounds like one mysterious lawman, but it records an actual camp and a force whose members ranged across wide territories. Mounted patrols made sense where roads were poor and settlements far apart: horses carried an officer, weapons, food, and evidence across country a wagon or early automobile could not reliably cover.

One Riot, Many Rangers RoadyGoat

You're in Ranger, Texas, so here's the ranger tangent behind the name: One riot, one Ranger is a powerful slogan, not a reliable operating rule. It became linked to Ranger Bill McDonald and an illegal eighteen ninety six prizefight near El Paso. The joke is that virtually every available Ranger was involved in efforts surrounding the event, which undercuts the lone-hero version. The Lone Ranger radio and television character strengthened the image of one masked lawman solving frontier disorder through courage and moral certainty. Real Ranger history includes public service and celebrated investigations, but also violence against Mexican Americans, Indigenous peoples, labor organizers, and others. Accuracy requires achievement and abuse in the same account.

The Oil Town That Arrived Overnight RoadyGoat

You're in Ranger, Texas, so here's the ranger tangent behind the name: Ranger was a drought-struck farming community when the McClesky Number One well came in during October nineteen seventeen. Oil transformed it into a crowded boomtown of derricks, refineries, banks, workers, gamblers, speculators, improvised housing, mud, fire, disease, and violent crime. The population may have reached roughly thirty thousand before production and finance collapsed after the short boom. Law enforcement in such a place faced a classic capacity problem: population and money arrived faster than sanitation, courts, housing, streets, and police institutions could grow. Ranger's name began with a camp, then the oil boom made Rangers and other officers newly necessary.

Ranger - The Oil Boomtown

1917

In 1917, the McCleskey No. 1 well blew in near Ranger, triggering one of the most chaotic oil booms in Texas history. The town's population exploded from about 1,000 to over 30,000.

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Site of J.H. McCleskey No. 1, Discovery Well of the Ranger Oil Boom

1915

The Texas and Pacific Coal Company struck oil at 1,000 feet about 10 miles east of Ranger in 1915. This event raised the hopes of area ranchers, farmers, and businessmen struggling to survive an economic slump brought on by severe drought and boll weevil-ravaged cotton fields. Oil expectations mounted then subsided when subsequent test-drillings turned up dry holes. Desperate local leaders sought out Texas and Pacific Coal Company general manager William Knox Gordon in nearby Thurber to help them continue the search for oil. Contrary to the conclusions of some geologists, Gordon believed oil lay much deeper within the earth than the depths reached by previous test drillings. Gordon agreed to drill to a depth of 3,500 feet and on July 2, 1917, contractor Warren Wagner began drilling here on J.H. McCleskey's farm. On October 17, 1917, at a depth of 3,432 feet, McCleskey Well No. 1 hit pay sand and roared in with an estimated daily flow of 1,600 barrels of oil. The well was plugged on May 18, 1920. J.H. McCleskey Well No. 1 sparked the much-heralded, wild, and prolific Ranger oil boom that gained Ranger international fame as the town whose oil wiped out critical oil shortages during World War I, allowing the Allies to "float to victory on a wave of oil." (1995)

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Ranger, Desdemona, and Breckenridge Oilfields

1917

Although the Ranger, Desdemona, and Breckenridge oilfields are sometimes considered separately, they are more logically discussed together because of their geographical proximity, times of discovery, and production figures. The oil prospecting in 1890 at Abilene found neither oil nor water, and no more test holes were drilled in this general region until 1912, when test holes in Eastland County indicated oil seven miles south of Ranger. In 1915 a good producer was brought in at Strawn, ten miles east of Ranger. A 200-barrel producer was brought in near Breckenridge in October 1916, and exploration continued in the Ranger area. In 1917 William Knox Gordon was persuaded by a group of Ranger citizens to finance a deep test well near Ranger. On October 21, 1917, the second test hole blew in under good pressure at 3,431 feet. This McClesky No. 1 well, a 1,700-barrel producer, opened the Ranger boom. Within a year, Ranger's population climbed from 1,000 to 30,000, mostly men, and Ranger became a typical oil-boom town. Gordon's company, the Texas Pacific Coal Company (reorganized as the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company), had leased most of the field, and as gusher after gusher came in, the territory was subleased at prices as high as $8,000 an acre. Independent operators and small companies fanned out from Ranger and opened such fields as the Gray-Hightower, the Parsons, the Sinclair-Earnest, and the Lake Sand. The most spectacular area was the Brewer pool, which produced more than $2 million worth of oil in 1918 and launched a frenzied drilling campaign. By 1919 eight producing horizons had been opened, and the field had produced nearly four million barrels of oil, which, because of its good quality and economic stimulus emanating from World War I , brought a top price of about $4.25 a barrel. The discoveries at Ranger stimulated exploration, and in September 1918 a 2,000-barrel discovery well blew in at 2,960 feet near Desdemona (frequently called Hog Town). Unlike Ranger, Desdemona was a small operator's field. Production reached a peak of 7,375,825 barrels in 1919, and then dropped sharply, chiefly because of overdrilling. There had been drilling in the Breckenridge area as early as 1911, but it had been unproductive. The No. 1 Chaney, coming in as a huge producer on February 4, 1918, began the boom, which swelled the population of Breckenridge from 800 to about 30,000 in a short time. Some 200 derricks rose within the town, and five years later more than 2,000 oil rigs were located in the immediate vicinity. The production at Breckenridge in 1919 was over ten million barrels and rose to a peak of 31,037,710 barrels in 1921. By means of acidization the Breckenridge field was kept as a producer, having an output of more than two million barrels in 1948. Ironically, while attention was drawn to major subsurface tectonic features during the search for petroleum, the failure of the majority who developed the fields to understand the area's geology resulted in serious consequences. Many operators, adhering to the "Rule of Capture" doctrine, bled away natural gas until petroleum flowed from the well bore. They destroyed reservoir dynamics by drilling offset wells along property lines, thus bringing a premature and expensive end to the oil game for many wildcatters, even though most of the oil was left underground. Over a thirty-year period, from 1950 to 1980, production levels gradually slumped, but in 1982 the Sun Oil Company flooded many dormant wells in the Ranger field with water from Possum Kingdom Lake, forcing remaining oil pools to rise to the surface. Though the boom days are past, the Ranger, Desdemona, and Breckenridge fields still contain many small producers; 5,601,323 barrels were produced in Stephens County alone in 1990.

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Ranger, TX

1917

Ranger, on Interstate Highway 20 between Abilene and Fort Worth in northeastern Eastland County, derived its name from the Texas Rangers , who in the 1870s had a camp in a valley about two miles northeast of Ranger on a prong of Palo Pinto Creek. This camp would have been at the south end of the present Hagaman Lake, earlier the Watson Ranch. By 1879 the beautiful valley housed a tent city with tent churches, schools, hotel, and general store, and was known as Ranger Camp Valley. In 1880 the Texas and Pacific Railway Company laid tracks a couple of miles west of the valley. In August 1880 I. G. Searcy deeded 160 hundred and sixty acres to Texas and Pacific Railway Company. The inhabitants of Ranger Camp Valley moved to the railway and established the permanent town of Ranger. On December 27, 1880, James M. Davis was appointed postmaster of the new Ranger post office. Between 1889 and 1904 Ranger grew from a town of 350 with two doctors to 750 with five doctors, a bank, a high school, and a women's literary club. It had become a trade center for Stephens County, an important wheat-producing area to the north. As an agricultural center, Ranger was hit hard by the drought of 1917. Inspired by adversity, a few residents encouraged William Knox Gordon , vice president of the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company, to begin testing for oil. The first well drilled, the Nannie Walker No. 1, was somewhat of a disappointment, as it first produced gas and only later blew in oil. But in October 1917 the McClesky No. 1 came in, reached a daily production of 1,700 barrels, and began a mammoth oil boom that drastically changed Ranger and Eastland County. The discovery of oil in Ranger led the oil industry to reappraise Texas as an oil-producing area and allayed fears of a nationwide oil shortage, which had been growing since 1900. In June 1919 the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company, whose stock had skyrocketed from thirty dollars to $1,250 a share, was drilling twenty-two wells in the area. Eight refineries were open or under construction, and the city's four banks had $5 million in deposits. Later in the boom, work was begun on an eight-inch pipeline to carry oil to the Gulf Coast. Although census figures never went higher than the 16,201 recorded in 1920, Ranger may have had 30,000 residents at one time. With the arrival of the Wichita Falls and Southern Railroad, Ranger a second railway line; trains running between Fort Worth and Abilene made five daily stops in Ranger. The city was incorporated in 1919. Not all the effects of the boom were positive, however. At about the same time that oil began flowing, the drought broke, and torrential rains fell through the fall and winter, turning Main Street into a three-foot bog in which one man reported he saw a mule drown. The rains, coupled with crowded and jerry-built housing, led to an epidemic of typhoid and influenza that killed many. Pictures from the boom days show derricks sprouting up like trees throughout the town. Their proximity meant that residents could never escape the smell of oil. It also meant that when wells came in and caught fire, as they often did, they endangered the whole town. One fire, on April 6, 1919, destroyed nearly two city blocks. The boom also brought with it rapid growth in the number of gambling houses and brothels, and oilfield killings reportedly were common; many people considered Ranger to be a typical oil-boom town. By 1921, after less than two turbulent years, the boom was spent. Eastland County wells, drilled into black lime, produced remarkably at first, diminished, and stopped after relatively short lives. A number of bank failures in 1921 put a decisive end to the boom, and by the time of the next census in 1930, the population of Ranger had fallen to 6,208. During the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan grew strong in Eastland County, with Ranger as the hub of activity. In the economic unrest after the oil boom spent itself, the Klan, with its anti-black, anti-Jewish,

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Ranger, Roaring

1917

Boom of high excitement and strategic importance. When oil demand was high during World War I, Texas Pacific Coal Company general manager W.K. Gordon, a believer in deep drilling, persuaded his company to make the venture that started Ranger's oil boom at McClesky No. 1 (1 mi. S). This blew in, October 1917, as a 1700-barrels-a-day gusher. Later gushers yielded up to 7,000 and 11,000-barrels-a-day each. Ten daily trains brought in prospectors packed in the aisles or on tops of coaches. Ranger's dozen or so houses became a city of drillers, suppliers, oil company offices. Living quarters were so scarce that not only were beds of day-tour men occupied by the graveyard-tour men, but overstuffed chairs were also rented for sleeping. Food was hard to get and prices were high. For two rainy years, Ranger was a sea of mud. A sled taxied people across streets, or a man in hip boots carried them piggyback. However, money was plentiful, and forces of vice moved in. After five murders occurred in one day, law officers arrested many criminals and expelled gamblers and vagrants. Ranger's success overshadowed its troubles. It is said to have yielded in a year twice the wealth of best years in California and Klondike gold fields. (1967)

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Davenport, Overton Fletcher

1861

Overton Fletcher Davenport, farmer, stock raiser, Confederate officer, county official, and state representative, was born in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, on February 10, 1820, the son of William and Elizabeth Sydnor (Andrew) Davenport. Davenport was raised in Georgia and married Margaret Susan Roberts in that state on December 29, 1842. This couple had two sons. Around 1850 Davenport traveled to California where he mined for gold until the end of 1851. His wife died shortly before or after his return. Overton Davenport married Eliza Agnes Pennington on August 5, 1852. This couple had eight sons and three daughters. Davenport immigrated with his family to Texas in 1855, settling a ranch and homestead at Station Creek near Eagle Springs in Coryell County. Here he engaged as a farmer and stock raiser. In 1861 following the outbreak of the Civil War Overton Davenport traveled to Harris County and enlisted as a private in Company H of the Tenth Texas Infantry Regiment. He received promotion to third lieutenant in March 1862 and was transferred to Company K. Overton was with this unit when it was captured at the Battle of Arkansas Post in January 1863. He spent the spring of 1863 in the Federal prison camp at Camp Chase, Ohio, before being exchanged at City Point, Virginia, on April 29. Davenport returned to service with the Tenth Texas and received promotion to first lieutenant then captain of Company A in May and November of 1863, respectively. He was wounded at the Battle of Franklin in November 1864 and the Battle of Nashville in December 1864. His second wound was serious enough to keep him in various Confederate hospitals at the closing stages of the war. Davenport was captured at a hospital in Okolona, Mississippi, on January 10, 1865, at which point he was sent to Sandusky, Ohio, before being paroled on May 12, 1865. Davenport returned to Coryell County to resume his farming and stock raising concerns as well as serve as county commissioner from 1865 through 1866. In 1872 Davenport won election as representative for District Twenty-eight—comprised of Bell, Brown, Comanche, Coryell, Hamilton, Hays, Lampasas, San Saba, Travis, Williamson, Coleman, Concho, and McCulloch counties—to the Thirteenth Texas Legislature. In 1892 Overton and several of his relatives relocated to Eastland in Eastland County. Davenport himself stayed in Eastland briefly before resuming his ranching activities near Ranger in Eastland County. Overton Fletcher Davenport died here on June 22, 1909, and was buried at Pioneer Cemetery in Ranger. He was a Baptist.

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Ranger, Texas

Music in Ranger

Songs About Ranger

Artists From Ranger

Rivers & Roads in Song near Ranger

History of Ranger

The Camp That Named the Town RoadyGoat

One Riot, Many Rangers RoadyGoat

The Oil Town That Arrived Overnight RoadyGoat

Ranger - The Oil Boomtown

Site of J.H. McCleskey No. 1, Discovery Well of the Ranger Oil Boom

Ranger, Desdemona, and Breckenridge Oilfields

Ranger, TX

Ranger, Roaring

Davenport, Overton Fletcher

Things to Do in Ranger

Everything Near Ranger