Spindletop Field - 1901
Regular price54.95
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The Oil Boom as an Infant
California makes a huge deal of the gold rush, but its only enduring legacy is Levi's blue jeans and a football team in San Francisco.
Spindletop gave us the twentieth century.
No Spindletop: no oil boom. No oil boom: no automobile for America to fall in love with. No Henry Ford. No assembly line. No fuel for the engines of industry and innovation.
Sure, these developments were already in motion, but is was a slow motion. Spindletop was a big bang that gave birth to a whole new universe. Plentiful oil literally fueled the second industrial revolution.
Spindletop gave us the twentieth century.
No Spindletop: no oil boom. No oil boom: no automobile for America to fall in love with. No Henry Ford. No assembly line. No fuel for the engines of industry and innovation.
Sure, these developments were already in motion, but is was a slow motion. Spindletop was a big bang that gave birth to a whole new universe. Plentiful oil literally fueled the second industrial revolution.
The Modern World is Born
The twentieth century was born in Beaumont on January 10, 1901. That's the day the Lucas Gusher came in. It blew a thousand feet of four inch pipe out of the hole, sent oil two hundred feet in the air, and ran wild for ten days.
The horde rolled in and Beaumont tripled in size. In the space of a year lots of poor men got rich and many rich men got poor and then rich again.
This map is the closest you will ever come to having a baby picture of the Texas oil boom.
It shows the Spindletop Field with seven producing wells (including the Lucas discovery well,) along with twenty-five more being drilled on various leases.
These numbers, and the fact that the Beatty Gusher (April, 1901) is not shown, means you are looking at a snapshot of the field sometime between February and March of 1901.
A year later there would be over 500 companies active in the field with 285 producing wells. They didn't call it a boom for nothing.
The horde rolled in and Beaumont tripled in size. In the space of a year lots of poor men got rich and many rich men got poor and then rich again.
This map is the closest you will ever come to having a baby picture of the Texas oil boom.
It shows the Spindletop Field with seven producing wells (including the Lucas discovery well,) along with twenty-five more being drilled on various leases.
These numbers, and the fact that the Beatty Gusher (April, 1901) is not shown, means you are looking at a snapshot of the field sometime between February and March of 1901.
A year later there would be over 500 companies active in the field with 285 producing wells. They didn't call it a boom for nothing.
Physical Details
- Limited Edition of 254 Copies
- Each one is hand-numbered
- 21 by 14 inches
This is a high quality giclee print.
The paper is acid free, cold press cotton watercolor with an elegant ever so lightly textured finish. This surface allows the inks to 'bite', reproducing the shading and tonality of the original map vividly, beautifully, and exactly.
The inks are guaranteed color-fast for 80 years, which means you won't need to lay out the extra money for UV glass. You can hang your map in direct sun and it will be just as bright when they are passed on to the next generation it is the day it ships.
It's an instant heirloom. Get yours before they're gone...and get one to give to a friend. He'll owe you!
