The Toughest Town on the Pecos RoadyGoat

The West Texas oil boom that made this corner of the map arrived in 1926, when the Hendrick oilfield opened and Ward County went from empty to crowded almost overnight. Pipelines and railroad loading tanks went up at Wickett, Pyote and Monahans, and small settlements like Thorntonville filled with people chasing the work. The wildest of it, though, happened about thirty miles west, over the county line in Winkler County, at a town called Wink. Wink went from nothing to thirty-five hundred people by late 1927 and six thousand by 1929, and it brought bootlegging, prostitution and gambling with it. The underworld got so far inside the new city government that a district judge threw out the incorporation election outright in October of 1928, and Texas Rangers under Captain Wright were sent into boom towns like Wink to put the lid back on. Thorntonville sat close enough to feel the money, and close enough to hear the stories.

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Engineering the Boom's End RoadyGoat

The oil that built this corner of West Texas came out of the Hendrick field, and the way it was produced is a hard lesson in reservoir engineering. The oil sat in porous limestone, and beneath it lay water under enormous hydrostatic pressure — that pressure was the thing pushing the oil up in the first place. In the frenzy after the 1926 discovery, wells went in on town-lot spacing, packed shoulder to shoulder, and the reservoir pressure was simply wasted. Production peaked in March of 1929: more than five million barrels in a single month from five hundred seventy-seven wells. Then the water came up behind it. By the end of 1931 the field was in steep decline and every well in it was making water — twenty-six barrels of saltwater lifted for every barrel of oil. Millions of barrels stayed in the ground for good. Thorntonville didn't die of it, though. It's still here, five hundred-odd people, a lot quieter than the boom ever imagined.

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The Tank That Couldn't Hold Oil RoadyGoat

If you have a moment, you should see one of the strangest landmarks in Texas: the Million Barrel Museum. Its centerpiece is a colossal concrete tank built in 1928 by Shell Oil. During the frantic oil boom, pipelines couldn't be built fast enough, so Shell decided to construct a massive reservoir to store the crude. It was an ambitious oval, 525 feet by 422 feet, covering about eight acres. But there was a problem. The concrete had been poured in sections, and nobody then had a good way to seal the seams. When they finally ran a million barrels of oil into it, the weight came to four hundred million pounds of pressure, and the oil simply seeped down into the sand. It held its load exactly once, and that was the end of the experiment. For years it sat empty, a giant concrete bathtub in the desert — a later owner even tried turning it into a water park, and that lasted a single day. Today this monument to boom-time ambition is a community museum and event space, a fascinating reminder of a time when the oil flowed so fast people didn't know what to do with it.

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Holman House

1910

Built about 1910 by Mr. and Mrs. Jas. R. Holman, 1898 settlers in Monahans. "Dad" Holman had a lumber and coal business, dray, and livery stable; he met daily trains and took home seekers of salesmen to the family hotel. One of family's six children was Eugene Holman (1895-1962), petroleum industry leader who rose in 1944 to presidency of Standard Oil of New Jersey, the world's largest oil company. Outstanding in labor relations, he was an advisor to U. S. Dept. of Commerce; won (1960) American Petroleum Institute gold medal of distinguished achievement.

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Trooper Billy Jack Zachary Memorial Highway

2006

Honors TX DPS Trooper Billy Jack Zachary, killed on New Year's Day 2006 when struck by a passing vehicle during a traffic stop on I-20 in Ward County near Monahans.

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Million Barrel Tank

1928

A project of the Shell Oil Company, the construction of this oil storage tank in 1928 was the result of an oil boom in the area. Built to accommodate crude oil until it could be shipped to refineries, the tank was constructed by crews working on a 24-hour schedule using hand operated and horse-drawn equipment. Covering eight acres of land, the tank was able to hold over one million barrels of oil. It was filled to capacity only once. Efforts to convert it into a water-filled recreation center in the 1950s were unsuccessful, and it became a museum in 1986.

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Monahans Sandhills

3,840 acres of sand dunes up to 70 feet tall in West Texas, remnants of ancient Permian sea beaches. Oak trees grow in the sand.

Natural Landmark → · 7.2 mi away

Sublett, William Caldwell

1881

William Caldwell Sublett, West Texas pioneer who discovered gold in the lower Pecos River region, the son of Caldwell and Nancy Sublett, was born on September 25, around 1834, in Tennessee, possibly in Franklin County. He grew up in what was then Belton County, Alabama, where his father served as sheriff in the 1840s and 1850s, and nurtured a dowsing ability as a youth. He first moved to Texas after the winter of 1857 and served as a Texas Ranger in Capt. Edward Burleson 's company from January 20 until September 9, 1860. After eighteen months somewhere on the frontier he returned to the settled part of Texas to find the nation torn by the Civil War . He joined Gordon's Regiment, First Arkansas Cavalry, Confederate States of America, on August 4, 1862, and was cited for gallantry in the battle of Fayetteville, April 18, 1863. After the war he married Laura Louisa Denny and moved to St. Louis, Missouri. He returned to Texas by July 1870 and took up residence in Bowie County, where he farmed intermittently the next four years. His wife died in 1873, leaving their three children in his care. After late 1874 he moved them to West Texas and took up buffalo hunting . About 1880 Sublett became an advance water scout and supplier of game meat for the Texas and Pacific Railway, which was pushing westward from Fort Worth. In early 1881, while operating from the temporary railhead at Colorado (later Colorado City), he discovered gold dust and nuggets somewhere in the Pecos River country at a site he contended was a mine; he would not divulge the location. He lived briefly in Granbury in the early 1880s before becoming one of three men to settle Monahan (Monahans) in 1883. By 1887 he had moved to Odessa, where he assumed two Ector County homesteads in the next two years; he sold one and fulfilled occupancy requirements for a patent on the other. Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s Sublett made periodic trips to his gold source but continued to live frugally enough that he paid taxes on only $265 in possessions in 1891. Repeated attempts to track him to the site of the mine or wrench directions from him failed, and the location of his gold went with him when he died in Barstow, Ward County, on January 6, 1892. His son, Rolth (or Ross) Sublett, became chief among the many who later searched for the Lost Sublett Mine. Rolth claimed that as a boy he once accompanied his father to the site, which he believed lay in the Guadalupe Mountains or in the Rustler Hills of Culberson County. All efforts at finding the mine have met with failure.

Tsha Handbook → · 10.9 mi away

Pyote Air Force Station

1942

Pyote Air Force Station (formerly Pyote Army Air Field) was established as a bombardment crew training base during World War II and nicknamed "Rattlesnake Bomber Base" by the servicemen. It was on 2,745 acres of University of Texas land a mile southwest of the town of Pyote, twenty miles west of Monahans and just south of U.S. Highway 80. Two giant runways, each over 1½ miles long and 150 feet wide, and a taxiway formed a triangle on the flat, arid land. Construction of the facilities, including five large hangars, shops, warehouses, and living quarters, began on September 5, 1942. The first troops were assigned within a month, well before the base was completed. Troops and civilian technicians poured in, and the population of the base grew steadily to a peak of over 6,500 in October 1944. Within four months of its opening, the base had become the largest bomber installation in the country. Despite morale problems caused by isolation and the shortage of off-base recreation and of dependents' housing, Pyote achieved a distinguished record in molding inexperienced individuals into effective bomber crews. After the arrival of the famed Nineteenth Bombardment Group on New Year's Day, 1943, and the ceremonial inauguration of its training program on January 5, Pyote rapidly turned out crews proficient in hitting targets from the B-17 Flying Fortress until the summer of 1944, when it was switched to the B-29 Superfortress. The Nineteenth was the first air force unit to bomb Japanese targets; it flew to Pyote directly from combat in the Pacific. The base was redesignated the Nineteenth Combat Crew Training School late in 1943 and then replaced on March 30, 1944, by the 236th Army Air Forces Base Unit (Combat Crew Training School). In June 1945 the base claimed records for the most B-29 training hours flown by any base in a single month (7,396), in a week (1,873), and in a day (321). Control of Pyote was transferred from the Second Air Force to the San Antonio Air Technical Service Command on November 15, 1945, at the end of the war, and the base became an aircraft-storage depot. At its peak in 1948 the depot, which was maintained by the 4141st Army Air Forces Base Unit, housed 2,042 stored planes, mostly B-29s and B-17s, but including B-25s, A-26s, C-47s, P-63s, P-51s, AT-7s, L-5s, and L-4s. Best known of all was the Enola Gay , from which the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; this famous plane was flown to Washington, D.C., on December 2, 1953, for preservation at National Air and Space Museum. After the Korean War, all of the planes at Pyote were moved or scrapped, and most activity on the base ceased. For a few years in the 1950s and 1960s, the 697th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, an Air Defense Command unit, operated a radar site on the base. Following the deactivation of the site in 1966, base housing was taken over by the West Texas Children's Home, and the land and remaining buildings reverted to the University of Texas. By 1985 a single large hangar and slowly deteriorating runways and taxiways were all that marked the once-busy bomber base.

Tsha Handbook → · 12.1 mi away

Thorntonville, Texas

Music in Thorntonville

Songs About Thorntonville

Artists From Thorntonville

Rivers & Roads in Song near Thorntonville

History of Thorntonville

The Toughest Town on the Pecos RoadyGoat

Engineering the Boom's End RoadyGoat

The Tank That Couldn't Hold Oil RoadyGoat

Holman House

Trooper Billy Jack Zachary Memorial Highway

Million Barrel Tank

Monahans Sandhills

Sublett, William Caldwell

Pyote Air Force Station

Things to Do in Thorntonville

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