Back in 1894, oil was just an after thought in Texas

Old documents chart the rapid expansion of state’s energy industry

There was a time when Texas, one of the predominant oil and gas producers in the world, produced hardly any oil and gas.

In the late 19th century, petroleum production in Texas was almost negligible — dwarfed by thousands of barrels of oil coming from Kentucky. Texas’ minuscule petroleum output, just a few dozen barrels, barely warranted two pages in the U.S. Geological Survey’s report cord of states’ mineral resources in 1894.

The story of Texas’ myriad oil booms has long since eclipsed whatever memories there were of a state that depended on homesteading and cattle ranching. But that changed dramatically for Texas a few years after the federal government recorded those dismally low oil production numbers.

By 1901, gushing wells of oil put the state on the world map. In January of that year, the Spindletop well in Beaumont exploded and triggered the Texas oil boom. Today, West Texas’ prolific Permian basin produces around 2.5 million barrels of oil a day.

The records that chart the growth of the state’s oil industry, from the reports of long-ago bureaucrats to books that recount the development of energy resources and modern Texas, are kept in the small library of the Railroad Commission of Texas, where they can be viewed by the public. The Geological Survey’s 1894 report came to the library during the Great Depression, after it was discovered in an antique shop and given to Ernest Thompson, a railroad commissioner, said Susan Rhyne, assistant director of central records for the commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator.

In 1894, oil was accidental and not particularly lucrative. It bubbled up from tar springs in central and eastern parts of the state, according to records kept by the Geological Survey, which catalogued the nation’s mineral resources in annual reports. The oil was thick — about the consistency of heavy to medium crude by modern standards — and geologists at the time weren’t sure what to call it.

In Texas, they called it petroleum; in California it was maltha, or some kind of mineral-heavytar.

The title of a seminal work on Texas’ oil history ,“Texas Oil and Gas since 1543” by James Clark, says it all — oil has been an ever-present, if sometimes unknown, resource in Texas. The tarry substance known as crude oil had likely been used for centuries by Native Americans, Rhyne said.

As the 20th century was dawning, there was little use for oil beyond heating, illumination and lubricants for equipment. Texas’ dense oil had even more limited use. Most of it came from Bexar County, where oil seeped into water wells drilled a few hundred feet into the ground.

“As there is but limited demand for oil, there is no effort to produce it in large quantities,” the Geological Survey noted in the 1894 report .

That year, a San Antonio rancher and business man named George Dullnig claimed most, if not all, of Texas’ oil production. Dullnig had made at least 11 attempts to drill freshwater wells on his land and instead hit oil and gas — the first recorded production of both resources in Texas.

In the that era, stumbling across oil seemed a common occurrence. The Geological Survey recorded Texas oil discoveries throughout the 1880s in the eastern part of the state.

By the 1930s, Texas’ 19thcentury oil production must have seemed quaint. The wells in the East Texas Oil Field were gushing enough to fill hundreds of barrels of oil an hour and thousands of barrels a day.

“As there is but limited demand for oil, there is no effort to produce it in large quantities.” U.S. Geological Survey, 1894