Golden land still paying off
In South Texas, richest county in nation hangs on to its wealth
TILDEN — About 150 years ago, the Wheeler family journeyed by horsedrawn wagon from Tennessee to settle in McMullen County, where land was cheap and plentiful, if not exactly hospitable. They raised cattle through droughts, depressions and wars, working jobs off the farm — at a gas plant, in the courthouse — when it didn’t pay enough.
And then the shale boom came. In the oil-rich northern part of the county, the Wheelers leased their land for drilling, bringing in a steady stream of cash that eased their financial strain when they had to sell the ranch’s cattle after a recent dry spell desiccated the animals’ food supply.
“It’s been a real blessing,” said Joe Wheeler, the family’s patriarch, sitting down for lunch after church one Sunday at the general store that bears his
family name.
It’s been a real boost to the county’s economic statistics, too. A handful of families like the Wheelers have made this rectangle of brushy land an hour south of San Antonio the highestincome county in the country in 2015, ahead of banker-heavy Manhattan and tech-dense Palo Alto, according the latest federal tax data. Locals, unaccustomed to notoriety, found the news reports bemusing. “We got a good chuckle out of that,” Wheeler said.
The average income in this county of just 800 people tops $300,000 a year, a figure that isn’t a result of wealthy people moving in but rather money flowing to people who have lived here for decades. It’s an extraordinary statement about the power of natural resources to enrich communities that have little in the way of agriculture or industry. But that income statistic tells you only a small part of the story.
Unlike many rural areas that struck it rich with the fracking revolution and went broke with the bust, McMullen County has managed to suck up that wealth and retain it, like a camel stores water in its hump. A lot of that, residents say, has to do with a culture of investing wisely, spending modestly and giving back to support whatever needs the community might have.
And a lot of it also has to do with the difficulty that outsiders have moving in, keeping the population small and allowing a handful of families to significantly raise the average income.
Town full of millionaires
When Carlos Garduño accepted a position as assistant pastor of Tilden Baptist Church in 2015, the senior pastor, Jim Furgerson, told him that the town was special.
“A lot of the people here say they’ve been blessed by the Eagle Ford shale economy,” said Garduño, a fresh-faced new father who just took over for Furgerson as head pastor of the centuryand-a-half-old church. But you wouldn’t know it to look at his congregants: The newly wealthy still come to services in pressed jeans and worn boots.
“My mother-in-law asked, ‘Did I shake any millionaires’ hands today?’ ” Garduño recalled, after his family came to watch his first sermon. “And I said, ‘Yes, more than likely, more than once.’ ”
For Tilden Baptist, which has about 80 members, that has meant never worrying about money. The church had about twice the typical budget for a congregation its size, reaching nearly $750,000 per year in 2015, Garduño said. They spent nearly $200,000 annually on mission trips around the world.
Church leaders even had architects draw up plans for a $9 million church complex to accommodate educational and community activities, and bought the block around the 70-year-old building for about $500,000 during the height of the boom.
The church wasn’t the only one that benefited from local largesse.
Tilden has the only school in the county, and kids are bused from more than an hour away to attend. During the oil boom, attendance at the elementary, middle and high school swelled from about 160 to 280 students. To deal with the influx, voters approved bond measures in 2012 and 2014 worth about $26 million total, which superintendent Dave Underwood says was easier because county residents were doing so well.
“It’s always easier to pass something when things are on the up,” Underwood said.
The bond paid for the renovation of the one-story building, and additions like a new library, new cafeteria, art and music classrooms, and new school buses. But many community members and companies gave more: An elaborate new playground bears the names of sponsors including Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy, which had extensive operations in McMullen County, as well as ranching families like the Quintanillas, Dilworths and Donnells. The senior class at McMullen High has only around 20 students, but in 2016 they brought in $648,000 in scholarships for college tuition and expenses, most of it from local foundations.
And then there’s the county itself, which was able to expand its services substantially as the tax collections swelled. In 2011, the taxable value of the county was about $400 million. By 2015, it had risen to $4.2 billion.
Unlike many rural areas, McMullen has round-the-clock police patrols, road and sewer projects underway, and free garbage pickup. It’s starting a health clinic with a nurse on hand five days a week — a big help when the nearest hospital is 30 miles away.
On top of that, the county has built its reserves to help when times aren’t so good.
The oil bust has since sliced the county’s tax base to about $2 billion. “That’s a big cut,” said County Judge James Teal, “but still wonderful, when you’re looking at what it was.” Barriers to entry Of course, not everyone in town has benefited personally from the oil boom. The county still has a median household income — which only counts wages, not mineral royalties — of $46,250, substantially below the national and Texas levels.
The shale boom largely bypassed Oscar Garza, 52, who grew up in Tilden, moved to San Antonio after graduating from high school, and returned there with his wife and children about 10 years later. He works for the county doing road maintenance, and trains horses for income on the side. It’s a stable living, but Garza didn’t enjoy riches that befell the ranch kids he went to school with.
“The only ones that really benefited from the oil rush were all the people who got land,” Garza says, sitting in a rocking chair on his porch, where he can see his dad’s house and his sister’s house.
Mary Brown, a real estate agent who deals mainly in South Texas ranches at Desert Flower Realty, said that the tracts owned by longtime ranchers rarely comes up for sale. She said she couldn’t remember the last time her firm sold a parcel in McMullen County. Also, with the water table 4,700 feet underground, drilling wells would make new housing prohibitively expensive, even if you could buy the land.
McMullen County added only two housing units between 2010 and 2015, according to the Census.
“Water’s really hard to come by in McMullen County, which is why the population is so small and will always be small,” Brown said. The county’s population peaked in 1940 at 1,374 and has declined ever since, according to the Census.
Housing is in such short supply that the Tilden Baptist Church and the school district both had to build or acquire housing for their own staff, who otherwise would have had a very hard time finding it.
“There’s no way we could’ve lived in Tilden,” said Susan Magouirk, the church’s children’s minister, who moved from East Texas to take the job four years ago. “It just wasn’t available. There was nothing. You have to be on the inside track.”
The insularity is part of what has allowed the community to remain tight-knit and self-supporting, residents say. Historically, the county had a tagline: “The free state,” not dependent on state or federal funding, with any social needs taken care of by neighbors.
Caring for their own
Tilden is too small to support a human services office, so the church takes care of many resident needs. Australian energy producer BHP Billiton, which has wells in McMullen, donated $25,000 to Tilden Baptist to build a food pantry.
The school district declines to take federal money for its school lunch program for lower-income kids, which frees it from restrictions on what it can serve, But poor kids still get breakfast and lunch for free. There’s no public housing, but a local charity has rebuilt or replaced 17 homes for low-income residents since 2010.
Even Garza, the road maintenance worker, said that people in McMullen County look after each other. When his wife developed cervical cancer, all his old friends in the county showed up at a benefit to help out.
“The community here; they go above and beyond,” he said. “You know that they’re willing to help, and they can.”
Of course, said Teal, some people spent their oil money on flashy houses or new tractors. But more often, they paid off debts, added a garage, or paid for a son or daughter to quit their job in the city and come back to work on the ranch.
And the Wheelers? They fixed fences, laid new water pipelines for livestock and cleared brush (which can be expensive, requiring bulldozers or airplanes to do right). But spending lavishly isn’t how the people of McMullen County were raised, even when the land they’d owned for centuries turned into gold under their feet.
“The bottom line is, they were smart,” said Warren Wheeler, Joe’s son, of the county’s longtime residents.
“Especially the older people who’ve been through the ups and downs,” Joe added, finishing his Texas Philly sandwich. “They were smart.”