The East Texas Oil Field was a very big area in Texas where oil was found a long time ago. It was the biggest oil field in the world at the time of its discovery. It was a rectangular shape that was 42 miles long and about 10 miles wide and covered a total area of 140,000 acres. That's about the same size as a city with about 200,000 people living in it. The oil field was in Texas's five counties: Rusk, Gregg, Smith, Cherokee, and Upshur.
At the height of the oil boom, a town called Kilgore grew very quickly. It started with only 500 people living there, but at the height of the boom, there were 12,000 people living there. This happened because many people came to Kilgore to work in the oil industry. The town had a lot of oil wells, more than 1100 just within the town itself. In the whole East Texas Oil Field, there were more than 32,000 oil wells.
The map shows where the East Texas Oil Field was located in relation to the rest of Texas. It might look small on the map compared to the rest of the state, but it was actually very big. The top photograph on the wall was taken from the top of an oil derrick in 1937 and shows a lot of oil derricks in the distance. Oil derricks are tall structures used for drilling for oil.
Please head to the giant red piece of equipment just inside the front exhibit hall and click "next".
