First Discovery Wells and Then the Boom!   1930 to 1940

Longview's fortune was made by the largest single pool of petroleum ever discovered before or since in the 48 states.

Trapped in a layer of porous sandstone called the Woodbine formation about 3,600 feet below the surface, the hidden reservoir was roughly 40 miles long, five miles wide, and 125 feet deep along a lengthwise midline, tapering out at the edges. Nearly half of it was in Gregg County.

During September of 1930, a 70-year-old wildcatter from Alabama named C. M. Joiner completed a modestly productive oil well at the thin eastern edge of the pool about 15 miles south of Kilgore. The boom began when the second following well in that formation was completed about a mile south of the county line near Kilgore on December 28, 1930, flowing 22,000 barrels per day. The location was on land managed by Kilgore farmer and merchant J. Malcolm Crim on behalf of his mother. Almost overnight, the little farming community of Kilgore became a roaring boom town.

Hoping to encourage drilling farther north, the Longview Chamber of Commerce offered a prize of $10,000 for the first oil well in Gregg County within 12 miles of Longview. Longview realtor B. A. Skipper with other investors had already started drilling for the Woodbine on a farm owned by Kelly Plow Works Manager F. K. Lathrop, several miles northwest of Longview at Spring Hill. When that well was brought in on January 26, 1931, capable of producing 18,000 barrels per day, the possibility of a single huge field loomed. By the end of the year, 3,612 wells had been completed in that field. Rural Gladewater became a boom town like Kilgore.

Longview was spared the worst aspects of the boom because it lay several miles outside the oil field. Even so, every available bedroom in town was rented, men camped out on the courthouse lawn, and deals were signed on automobile hoods as tables. The field was mostly developed by independent operators, including many local investors. To enforce production limits, Governor Ross Sterling imposed martial law in August of 1931, but illegal "hot" oil reached 13% of the field's output in 1933. The original frenzy of the boom subsided by 1935. Nevertheless, except for a pause during World War II, drilling continued very actively until about 1950. Of 95 refineries scattered about the field, two large ones were located along the railroads immediately southwest and east of Longview.

It was in the 1930s that Longview acquired much of its later character. The city's population nearly tripled during the decade, to 13,758. The boomers were largely of the same Southern Protestant background as most earlier citizens, and they were rapidly assimilated. Longview's genteel, patrician leadership of former agrarian times prevailed over the newcomers until after World War II began. Even so, two years after national prohibition of alcoholic beverages was repealed in 1933, a local-option election made five of Gregg County's seven justice-of-the-peace precincts "wet." Liquor stores and honky-tonks became fixtures of the local scene except for the Judson and Elderville JP precincts and places such as Greggton where deed restrictions stood in the way. State Highway 15, widened and straightened, became U.S. Highway 80, nicknamed Main Street of Texas across the oil field. In Longview, the highway was returned from the central business district to the original route of the Marshall-Tyler Road a few blocks to the north. Pecan trees which had been planted along the two-lane Marshall Avenue in the 1920s under the sponsorship of the Longview Shakespeare Club as a memorial to veterans of World War I were saved by moving them to the courthouse square.

While the rest of the world suffered the traumas of the Great Depression, Longview's people, businesses, industries, schools, and churches were thriving. The Glover-Crim building was erected on the site of Bodie Park. At the southeast corner of Green and Methvin Streets, the McWilliams Building took the place of the First Christian Church, which moved to a new location on Sixth Street. Similarly, the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company building behind the post office succeeded Trinity Episcopal Church, which relocated to Padon Street. A new courthouse, city hall, post office, public library, and community center were constructed. A new high school was built in 1932 on North Street (soon renamed Whaley Street), and the 1928 high school became Longview Junior High School, later Henry L. Foster Middle School. Other notable new structures included the Longview National Bank, Arlyne Motion-Picture Theater (built by Tracy Flanagan, grandson of the Reconstruction senator), a county hospital (later Good Shepherd Medical Center), Markham Hospital on South Center Street, the new Hurst Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic on the southwest corner of Center and Whaley Streets, the "union" railroad station and associated underpass, and South Ward School. Some prominent residential developments of that era were Forest Hills, Nugget Hill, Surrey Place around Covington Drive, and the Mobberly Addition around Noel Drive.