Name: Wickett, Texas
Address: Wickett, TX

Taming the Sour Gas RoadyGoat

Wickett exists because of what comes up out of the ground alongside the oil. This was a railroad switch called Arroya back in 1881, nothing more. Then the Hendrick field opened in 1926, an oil discovery followed in 1927, and an oil operator named Fred H. Wickett promoted a townsite here and put his name on it. What made the place stick was not drilling, it was processing. In the 1930s Gulf Oil built a gasoline plant here to pull the valuable liquid hydrocarbons out of the wet gas coming off the field, gas that otherwise would have been flared into the West Texas sky. And right alongside it, the Cabot Company built a carbon black plant, which burns gas under a controlled starvation of air to make a fine black powder. That powder goes into rubber. It is the reason a tire is black and the reason it lasts. Two plants side by side, turning a waste stream into gasoline and into tires. By 1933 Wickett had a refinery and about 200 people, and it peaked near a thousand in 1964. The town was an answer to a chemistry problem.

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Wickett, TX RoadyGoat

Wickett sits high on the plains, a little over half a mile above sea level. The air is thin and dry, and the sky stretches on forever, a vast, pale blue bowl. This is Permian Basin country, a land sculpted by ancient seas that retreated millions of years ago, leaving behind layers of sediment that eventually formed the oil-rich rock beneath our feet. That geological legacy defines Wickett as much as anything; it's the reason the town exists. Just a short drive away, the Monahans Sandhills rise up, a surprising ocean of sand in the middle of the grasslands. Those dunes, remnants of a prehistoric river system, are a constant reminder of how much this land has changed over millennia. The tough grasses that manage to cling to life out here, the occasional pronghorn antelope darting across the horizon, even the stories whispered about forgotten caches of Prohibition-era whiskey near the old railroad tracks – they’re all part of a story etched into the landscape. It's a place that breeds resilience, where people have always found a way to make a life, connected to the land and to each other. And maybe, just maybe, a place that can inspire a song or two.

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.

RoadyGoat → · 5.1 mi away

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.

Historical Marker → · 4.2 mi away

Ward County

1807

Formed from Tom Green County; created February 26, 1887, organized March 29, 1892. Named in honor of Thomas William Ward, 1807-1872, at the storming of Bexar, December, 1835; Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1841-1848; United States consul at Panama, 1853-1856. Barstow, County Seat.

Historical Marker → · 4.0 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 → · 7.2 mi away

Pyote, TX

1926

Pyote, originally called Pyote Tank, is on Farm Road 2355, State Highway 115, U.S. Highway 80, Interstate Highway 20, and the Missouri Pacific line, seven miles southwest of Wickett in central Ward County. In 1881, before the Texas and Pacific Railway laid its tracks through the area, the company opened a telegraph office at Pyote Tank. The name for the town has been credited to the Chinese railroad workers' pronunciation of coyote. Other sources indicate it was named for the peyote cacti common to the region. In 1885 J. A. Stewart established the 7S Ranch, covering forty sections, three miles south of the community. In 1907 a post office was established with Albert D. Pigman as postmaster. Also in 1907 Cicero S. Sitton and his sons opened a store, a three-day barbecue was held, and most of the town lots were sold. A school petition was circulated at the barbecue, and later a one-room school building was constructed. Eventually, a $100,000 school building was erected on land donated by Otey Nockells Rogers. By 1925 the population of Pyote was reported at 100. In 1926 oil was discovered in Hendrick oilfield in nearby Winkler County. By 1928 Pyote became the trading and shipping center for area oil activity, and its population soared to 3,500. Thirty-one rooming houses and hotels were quickly built. City services could not meet the needs of the increased population. However, the boom ended in the 1930s when the railroad built a spur to Monahans, eliminating Pyote from oilfield shipping. In 1931 Pyote declined to a population of 1,097 and 115 businesses. The town incorporated before 1933 and maintained its population through 1939, by which time the number of businesses had declined to thirty-six. By 1941 the population was reported as 201 and the number of businesses as fifteen. In 1942 Pyote Air Force Station was constructed at Pyote south of Highway 80 on land owned by the University of Texas; it was used for bomber training. After World War II more than 4,000 bombers and fighter planes were sent to the Pyote base for melting into scrap metal. Among those stored there were the Enola Gay , which dropped the first atomic bomb, and Swoose , General MacArthur's plane. However, those two famous planes were rescued from destruction by the Smithsonian Institution. In the early 1960s Pyote had a population of 420 and eight businesses. Throughout the 1970s it had fewer than 200 people and either one business or none. In the 1980s it had a population near 400. Pyote is the site of the West Texas State School and the Rattlesnake Bomber Base Museum, which displays World War II memorabilia in an old building from the base. In 1990 the population was 348. The population dropped to 131 in 2000.

Tsha Handbook → · 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 → · 7.6 mi away

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.

Historical Marker → · 7.7 mi away

Wickett, Texas

Music in Wickett

Songs About Wickett

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Rivers & Roads in Song near Wickett

History of Wickett