Oil Museum Hits Gusher of Interest
Published Apr 25, 2008
Boomtown USA at the East Texas Oil Museum
The oil boom of the early 1930s forever transformed the sleepy railroad town of Kilgore.
Prior to the discovery of Daisy Bradford No. 3, Kilgore – population roughly 400 – was like many other struggling communities during the Depression.
The big strike brought national attention and 10,000 people hungry to make their fortune. Overnight, Kilgore became a destination, with new opportunities as well as new problems.
“With the flush of new money came the good, the bad and the ugly,” says Joe White, director of the East Texas Oil Museum at Kilgore Community College. The 27-year-old museum chronicles the area’s colorful oil history.
The first gusher tapped into an oil deposit – the East Texas Oil Field – that to this day remains the largest in the lower 48 states.
At the museum, children and adults can see, hear and feel what life was like during the oil boom. In “Boomtown USA,” the streets are rutted; the barbershop buzzes with rumors of a new gusher; the drugstore jukebox plays big band classics.
“They literally step back into time,” White says. “It represents a recreation of a moment of time, a day in the 1930s.”
The museum doesn’t just look back. In 2008, it launched a campaign to raise $20 million for a museum expansion that will “take the story of energy into the third millennium,” White says. The expansion will cover alternative fuels and include many hands-on activities to further strengthen the museum’s educational mission.
Story by Pamela Coyle
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