East Texas Oil Museum in Kilgore
by Kathy White
Title
East Texas Oil Museum in Kilgore
Artist
Kathy White
Medium
Photograph - Photography--greeting Cards Or Notes Are Cheaper By The Dozen!
Description
"The East Texas Oil Museum at Kilgore" photograph was shot by my husband David. The first thing that grabs your attention is the complete, huge, 30's style drilling rig ready for action on the front lawn.
The museum is located on the Kilgore College campus in Kilgore, Texas and was opened in 1980. This fascinating museum houses the authentic re-creation of oil discovery and production in the early 1930s from the largest oil field inside U.S. boundaries. There, visitors see the people, their towns, their personal habits, their tools and their pastimes – all colorfully depicted in dioramas, movies, sound presentations and actual antiques donated by East Texas citizens. School children from all over the area visit the museum every year to experience the oil boom. If it sounds boring to them at first, it's not long before they change their minds and are fascinated with the realistic exhibits in this museum.
"Texas Tea' arrived as sticky black goo seeping from the ground....and it affected the whole area. The museum gives you a very realistic taste of the times. There are Texas-sized, hand-painted murals of early oil production and portraits of famous oil men inside the lobby.
To tour the museum is to take a journey back in time as you walk through the city limits of Boomtown, USA, which is a full scale town full of stores, people, animals, and machinery depicting the lively activity of a town booming in oil. When the population of Kilgore exploded literally over night there was no place for people to eat, sleep, or even find a toilet. Mucking up the situation, literally, was an unusual amount of rain that fell in East Texas that year. The whole of East Texas became a muddy quagmire. Men and machines wrestled mother earth to get the black gold out of the ground. You don't have to imagine the muddy streets that were common back then, because there are muddy-like, rutted streets, filled with life size mule teams, cars, trucks and wagons stuck in the muck. Walk alongside this, and go into the newspaper office, the bank , the barbershop, the gas station, and enjoy the music of the 1930's big bands on the jukebox in the drugstore. A visit to the theater brings back actual historical footage of the boom period while you actually "sense" a blowout gusher.
Your visit is not complete without a trip to Boomtown's museum. Study the geographical exhibits and take the elevator ride to the center of the earth. Let your puppet guides take you 3,800 feet below the earth’s surface to where oil deposits lie. This whole trip to the East Texas Oil Museum is fun and very informative.
Before you leave, there is a great gift shop where you can take home a t shirt commemorating your visit, a coffee mug with the oil museum logo or pumping jack images on them, books about the oil boom and those exciting years, recipe books from East Texas cooks from all over, rocks, fossils, themed professional domino sets, trivets, hotpads, all sorts of Texas souvenirs and giftable items. It is run by folks who KNOW the oil boom history and can help you to know the events that shaped this area and turned it upside down because of the discovery of black gold.
Production swelled to more than 1,000,000 barrels daily and in August 1931, National Guardsmen were ordered into the area to keep peace between roughnecks, lease hounds, oil speculators and camp followers. These actions finally culminated in legislative actions that restored order and stability. The East Texas Oil Field has produced more than 4.5 billion barrels of oil. Some of that gave the Allies the petroleum-reserve stability needed to win World War II. The resulting wealth produced new towns, new ways of living and a livelihood for thousands of East Texas citizens. And wells are still pumping today.
Uploaded
March 10th, 2013
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