ENERGY CAPITAL’S BIRTH
The discovery of oil at Spindletop and the opening of Houston Ship Channel occurred 13 years apart, each a milestone in Texas history. But together, these two developments made Houston the energy capital of the world and helped fuel more than century of growth in Texas.
The confluence of these two major historical events begins with a third: the 1900 hurricane that smashed Galveston. The island community had grown into Texas’s largest city during the 1800s by becoming one of the country’s largest cotton ports, but the widespread destruction caused by the hurricane, which killed about 8,000 people, left 12,000 homeless and destroyed Galveston’s port, drove commerce to look northwest toward Houston.
Meanwhile, 75 miles to the northeast, Pattillo Higgins had formed the Gladys City Oil Co. in Beaumont in 1892. Higgins was convinced — rightly — that there was oil beneath Spindletop Hill and began trying to get to it.
Some historians have traced oil in Texas back to the 16th century, when Spanish explorers were believed to have used oil deposits to help caulk the bottom of their boats, according to the C.A. Warner book, “Texas Oil & Gas Since 1543.” In 1894, two years after Higgins from his oil company, the town of Corsicana stumbled into a mini- oil boom while drilling for water. Joseph Cullinan, who’d previously worked for John D. Rockefeller at Standard Oil, would build the state’s first full-scale refinery, and his company would eventually be part of Magnolia Petroleum Company, which later became part of Mobil Oil.
But that was a mere prelude to what happened at Spindletop. By 1899, Higgins had taken on mining engineer Anthony Lucas as a partner. Lucas then convinced Pittsburgh oil financiers James Guffy and John Galey to provide more funding, but elbowed Higgins out of the business and ultimately summoned the brothers Al and Curt Hamill, who had drilled oil wells in Corsicana.
On Jan. 10, 1901, they struck paydirt 1,160 feet underground with the Lucas gusher, which produced about 800,000 barrels worth of oil during nine days in January. Companies such as Humble Oil, Gulf Oil,
Sun Oil and Texas Fuel Co. (later Texaco) were founded for the purpose of extracting oil from Spindletop, which University of Iowa historian Tyler Priest has called “the birthplace of the modern oil industry.”
Marcellus Foster, who was covering the Spindletop event for the Houston Post, was so convinced of its future value that he invested in a venture there. The bet paid off, and Foster took some of his profits to found the Houston Chronicle, according to the Texas State Historical Association’s “Handbook of Texas.”
By the 1920s, Houston’s newfound title as the country’s oil capital would be further established after transplanted Houstonians Howard Hughes, Sr. and Walter Sharp opened SharpHughes Tool Co. and developed the dual- cone rotary drill bit, allowing the companies to drill through surfaces that weren’t nearly as compliant as the ground above Spindletop.
Oil would eventually become Houston’s most valuable commodity because, about 1,300 miles north in Michigan, Henry Ford would incorporate the
Ford Motor Company and sell its first Model A in 1903, the same year the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. Five years later, Ford would introduce the Model T, while the world’s first commercial-flight service began in Florida in 1914.
But first, Houston, then a city of about 45,000 known for cotton and timber, needed a sufficient shipping channel. Buffalo Bayou, the main transportation artery to the sea, was too shallow for anything but flat-bottomed boats that would offload cargo to larger ships in Galveston.
Congress helped by contributing $1 million for initial dredging of Buffalo Bayou in 190. But that wasn’t enough to pay for dredging the channel to 25 feet deep wasn’t enough to pay for dredging the channel to the 25 feet depth needed to handle oceangoing ships at the time
Nine years later, though, the city raised $1.25 million in a bond vote as manufacturers jockeyed for land near the proposed channel.
Congress kicked in another $1.25 million to complete the $3.5 million job (about $95 million today). Meanwhile, the state created its first navigation district.
The Houston Ship Channel and the Port of Houston opened in 1914 with such fanfare that the opening included a 21- gun salute. President Woodrow Wilson used a remote-control device in Washington to fire a cannon in Houston.
A year later, the channel received its first oceangoing deep-water ship, the Satilla. After the end of World War I, the Port of Houston began receiving foreign shipments. Within the next two ecades, as many as nine oil refineries started operations adjacent to the Houston Ship Channel, according to the “Handbook of Texas.”
Houston’s population would grow more than tenfold to about 600,000 by 1950. As of last year, the Port of Houston was the sixth-largest in the U.S. — trailing only Los Angeles-Long Beach, New York-New Jersey, Savannah, Seattle-Tacoma and Port of Virginia — and handled more than two-thirds of U.S. Gulf Coast container traffic, according to the Port of Houston.
Spindletop, ship channel became center of oil industry By Danny King CONTRIBUTOR