There are stories aplenty of “company towns” built by oil companies in oil’s early 20th century heyday, but no company town fit the mold better than a Basin town, Texon, that endured for generations.
by Bobby Weaver
Back in 1955 Tennessee Ernie Ford had a hit song entitled “Sixteen Tons” concerning the travails of a coal miner. That tune emphasized the generally accepted notion that the company town along with its company store was designed to keep the workers in subjugation. The refrain for “Sixteen Tons” went:
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don’t call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
The generally held belief that the company town is a bad thing is not necessarily true. More often than not the idea of a company town was tied to a paternalistic desire of the owners to provide a better life for their workers that would in turn make them better employees.
With that said, the definition of a company town is not always consistent. Traditionally the term is associated with extractive industries such as mining but not always. In Texas the coal mining town of Thurber in Erath County comes to mind as a classic example. At Thurber the company held title to all the land and owned all the businesses, churches, schools, and homes. True company towns had no elected city government and their most common denominator beyond all the property being owned by the company was that they had a post office and were called a town. The Thurber example is probably the purest example of a mining oriented company town in Texas, but that concept did not transfer well to the oil and gas industry.
There are a few examples of the company town concept in oil country, such as the town of Phillips near Borger in the Panhandle, but they all fall far short of a pure definition. The oil company camp concept also falls peripherally within that range, although oil company camps generally had no retail outlets nor post offices and were never designated as towns. The only municipality in the oil patch that approximated a pure company town designation was Texon, located in southwestern Reagan County a few miles west of Big Lake.
Texon’s founding was a direct result of the drilling of the Santa Rita #1 well in May of 1923, which was the discovery well for the Big Lake oil field, which in turn provided the impetus for the opening of the vast Permian Basin region. The Santa Rita well was drilled by the newly formed Texon Oil and Land Company, which lacked the financial wherewithal to develop the leases they held. (See here for the full story of the Santa Rita #1 strike). Consequently, in October of 1923 Pittsburgh wildcatters Mike Benedum and Joe Trees assumed ownership of a number of Texon’s leases, formed the Big Lake Oil Company, and began drilling up what became to be known as the Big Lake field.
Almost immediately the “boom was on” and the little railroad siding of Best adjacent to where the discovery well was drilled morphed into a stereotypical wild and woolly oil boom town. Just a couple of miles down the track, Santa Rita became another overnight boom town sensation although not with the lawless reputation of Best. Both of them, however, consisted of a variety of tents, shacks, and other types of primitive living accommodations. Meanwhile, the Big Lake Oil Company was saddled with the dilemma of providing housing for the large work force needed to drill and produce their holdings. Those raw and newly established boom towns did not fit the bill.
Levi Smith, vice president and general manager of the Big Lake Oil Company, was so appalled at the chaotic conditions in Best that he decided to build his own town, one whose residents would be restricted to company employees. By providing good living conditions he felt he would attract married family oriented workers rather than the usual single men that followed the booms. And if he succeeded that was deemed likely to translate into a stable work force, one more prone to produce a more efficient and profitable operation. Smith chose a site that lay barely outside of the two mile by four mile field production and just south of the Kansas City, Mexico, and Orient Railway tracks, about 14 miles west of Big Lake.
Between 1924 and 1926 Texon, named in honor of the company that had brought in the discovery well, became a reality. It was an oasis of calm and refuge amidst the tumult of a full fledged oil boom in that isolated part of West Texas. Indeed, Texon was widely touted in publications of the day as a fine example of a well ordered community that exemplified the benevolent nature of the oil companies toward their employees.
Early in 1924 amidst the frenzied drilling program of the boom, Smith started building Texon with the installation of supply warehouses, pipe yards, and workshops on the railroad side of town. That was quickly followed by two-bedroom houses designed for administrative personnel along the main street leading into town. Immediately across that street from those first houses he started construction a number of buildings designed to be rentals for various business. At he same time he began building a huge number of one-bedroom shotgun-type houses for the hourly employees that stretched outward to make up the larger portion of the town.
In the early days of Texon utilities were at a premium. Although gas was piped in from the field for heating purposes, it was a while before a generator was installed to provide electricity for the homes and businesses. Water was even more difficult to obtain and water was either delivered to the homes by tank trucks or fetched by residents from a centrally located water tank. In those early years the company also provided two large bath houses, one for men and one for women, near the center of town, where bathing could take place.
By the time construction ended in 1926, electrical power was available and water piped to the homes. By then businesses had cropped up in all the rental spaces along the main street of the town. Ultimately Texon sported a café, a drugstore, a grocery store, a dry goods store, a boarding house, a filling station, a movie theater, a barber shop, and all the other retail accoutrements of a town. Additionally, the company provided a post office, a community church, a hospital, and an elementary school. The school served those children in the first through the sixth grades and those older than that were bussed to schools in Big Lake. Recreation played a big part in the town, as evidenced by the existence of a company-built golf course complete with greens of oiled sand in lieu of grass, as well as tennis courts, a swimming pool, a club house, and a baseball stadium.
The baseball stadium was particularly interesting because Smith, who was an avid fan, organized a semi-pro baseball team to play there. The summer of 1925 saw the completion of the baseball field and the following year a 500-seat grandstand was added. Although originally called the Big Lake Oil Company Oilers, the team soon became the Texon Oilers, a team whose roster was filled by former college athletes as well as seasoned semi-pro players hired on a full-time work/play basis. In 1929 the company began hosting a huge annual Labor Day barbeque and baseball game for all employees and friends. The Texon Oilers had a successful run in various West Texas leagues from the time of its founding through the decade of the 1930s. However, with the waning of oil production and the decline of the town’s population, the team was disbanded at the beginning of the 1940s just as World War II began.
There was considerable competition among company employees to acquire one of the Texon houses and escape the primitive living conditions in the field. Rental for the homes varied wildly from $4.00 per month for one of the little one-bedroom shotgun houses to as much as $35.00 per month for one of the larger management houses along the main street. The population of the town reached a high of 1,200 during the first years of the 1930s. Among the residents were two or three African American families whose menfolk were hired to do general maintenance on the structures in the town.
By the beginning of the decade of the 1940s the town’s population began to decline in a direct relationship to the oil production of the Big Lake field. Some were transferred to other locations by the company, some retired, and some just left as the job market dried up. During the first years of the 1950s the population of Texon fell to less than 500 residents. In 1956 ownership of the town passed to the Plymouth Oil Company and the population continued to decline. Then in 1962 the Marathon Oil Company bought the property and ceased maintaining the town, whose population had fallen to fewer than 100 souls. In 1986 the post office was closed and by the turn of the century there were only ten residents. Sometime in the first five years of the 21st century the last of Texon’s residents were gone. During its lifetime Texon engendered an amazing sense of camaraderie among its residents, who shared the lifestyle of living and working together within the culture of the oil patch.
Although the town withered and died along with the slow ebbing of oil production, a vivid memory remained in the minds of those who had lived there. In 1962, when Marathon discontinued maintaining the town, those living there along with others long gone from the town organized a reunion held over the Labor Day weekend just as they had in years gone by when the company had hosted the big barbeques and the Oilers played ball. Later the date was changed to the first weekend in June on an annual basis, which over time was changed to every two years. It was always a pleasant event where old friends met and swapped tales of the times when the town was alive and thriving. As late as the first few years of the 2000s more than 100 attended that affair, but like so many events of that nature, old age and changing times and the die-off of former residents gradually caused reunion attendance to dwindle, until in 2014 it was discontinued altogether. Today there are no structures left on the site of Texon, but its memory lives on as the example of the only true company town established in the oilfields of Texas.
Bobby Weaver is a regular contributor to Permian Basin Oil and Gas. His humor column, “Oil Patch Tales,” appears in each issue.