With industry and broad backs, they pulled from the earth the fuel of an American era. The great locomotives and steamships of the Industrial Revolution met their end in these verdant hills, undone by pockets of workers looking for something more. Towers rose tall and narrow like forests of Italian cypress. They sprouted from backyards, farm fields, and church lots. Lumbering machines ground holes through the earth. Drill stems toppled onto men. Pressure pockets pushed up around drill holes, swallowing whole derrick crews into bubbling, black sinkholes. For all this, the pay wouldn’t make a man rich, but the work kept him too busy to know the curse of quiet, desperate hours in a soup line. The roughnecks’ skin did what it could. It creased and set to accommodate habit and motion, sacrificed softness to sun and wind and dust, and turned their palms to rock.
The foolish or careless seldom lasted long enough to become supervisors like Joe Davidson. When Joiner’s discovery well came in a gusher in October 1930, Joe and Mary Davidson were raising four children in a rented house near West Columbia, Texas, about thirty miles from the Brazos River’s outlet into the Gulf of Mexico.12 They had lived there since about 1918, the year the twenty-square-mile oil field was discovered in the salt domes near the gulf. A frenzy of drilling that year brought in the heavy operations of oil-field giants like the Texas Company—later known as Texaco—and Gulf Production Company. At the field’s peak in 1921, West Columbia wells pumped 12.5 million barrels of oil.13 On July 21 of that year, the Davidsons’ baby boy, Joseph Wheeler Davidson Jr., was born. The couple’s other children, all girls, came along shortly after: Marilla in 1923; Helen in 1924; and finally, Anna in 1926.
Production had fallen steeply in West Columbia by the time the stock market crash of 1929 unleashed the Great Depression. The major oil companies slashed production operations in the field, and within less than two years the town’s population plummeted from nearly 2,500 to just 1,000.14
Joe and Mary Davidson joined the exodus. They packed all their belongings, tied mattresses and boxes to the roof of their car, and, with their children, headed north toward New London and the Black Giant. Word of Joiner’s extraordinary discovery, and the wealth of jobs it had created, proved irresistible to the Davidsons. There they found something more permanent, a new bounty of backbreaking labor and full dinner tables.
On the morning of March 18, 1937, Joe Davidson rose quietly from his bed and walked to the window. His life had been a constant challenge, from an upbringing in poverty-stricken Cajun country to the carnage of war-torn Europe to the oil fields. He had guarded his soul behind bars of clenched teeth. What gentility he preserved belonged to his family. The rest of life was work. This morning he had plenty of time before he needed to prepare for his day, but the nightmare was still too fresh for rest or peace. It was barely above fifty degrees, but soon crickets would be chirping in bushes outside the house. The forecasters called for clear skies and calm winds, with temperatures warming. This countryside of low, rolling hills and fields dotted with growing towns and rural hamlets generally enjoyed pleasant weather this time of year. It tempted people in the prediction business to imagine consistency where none existed. Tornadoes could snap from the bellies of storm clouds, snatching metal and flesh from the ground, and rarely would the forecasters predict it. Even on this day, the weather seemed calm, yet hundreds of miles from East Texas, a towering, violent storm was moving slowly northward from the Gulf of Mexico. The pressure in New London was falling, the gases in the air expanding.15
Davidson pushed back against the ghost of his dream. He began to dress as his wife and children stirred from their sleep. Beneath him and for three hundred square miles around, the Black Giant sprawled with monstrous, pent-up power.
3
The Superintendent
William Chesley Shaw sat at his desk in his home on the school’s campus and was bothered by other people’s headaches. For more than a week he’d been investigating recurring complaints from students and teachers about strange headaches occurring during class in various parts of the high school. Others reported irritated eyes.1 So far, the source was a mystery. He had the janitors check for a gas leak, and they found none—although one of them had wiggled into the crawl space one day and, right under the gas line, lit a match so he could see better.2 The memory made Shaw push up his round glasses and massage the bridge of his nose. Today he would meet several school directors for a walk-through of the building to check again for the source of the problem.3
The headaches were one item on a lengthy agenda requiring Shaw’s attention this day. The monthly meeting of the Parent-Teacher Association at the high school was the highlight.
The medium-height, trim superintendent of the sprawling school district—serving more than twelve hundred students—had begun his career thirty-seven years earlier, teaching a dozen children inside a rural one-room schoolhouse near Jacksonville, Texas.4 Shaw had come a long way since then. The London Consolidated School District had risen rapidly on the region’s fortunes and was considered now to be the wealthiest rural district in the nation, some said the world.5 This had little to do with the parents’ wealth. Most of them, like Joe Davidson, were oil-field workers who generally struggled to make ends meet. Any money left after paying for rent, food, clothes, and the car was doled out for rare luxuries—a trip to an ice cream parlor or a movie over the weekend—or saved for a new appliance or the family’s first radio. Other parents operated family farms, and many of the farmers were forced to take jobs on the side to supplement income from farming.
Chesley Shaw was born and raised on a family farm about two miles from “Old” London, the original hamlet that gave rise to New London. Hard times shaped much of his life, even before the Depression hit. Although he was superintendent of a school district awash in oil money, Shaw remained tightfisted when it came to expenditures he considered frivolous, ever aware as a student of history that bad times followed good. Only a fool loses sight of this, Shaw thought. The nation’s economy sputtered slowly toward a recovery, but nobody could guarantee the bottom wouldn’t fall out again—even in East Texas.
Around Superintendent Shaw’s white-walled home, a dozen wells chugged away throughout the day and night, drawing barrels of money from the Black Giant. The families who followed the East Texas oil boom—transients and displaced workers seeking shelter from the Depression—brought with them the need for schools, and New London had commissioned a masterpiece three years earlier. The junior-senior high school—a two-story, 250-foot-long, E-shaped building—sat at the district’s center, a jewel of beige brick and red Spanish tile. To run it, they hired Shaw, now sixty-one, an educator whose accomplishments at New London echoed across the country in educational journals and news stories. The oil money flowing in allowed the district luxuries no school had ever acquired. A crew erected towers around their football field crowned with floodlights, among the first Friday night lights in a state that would one day become famous for them. Shaw had opposed the lights but was outmaneuvered by the football coach, Carroll Evans, a wily and garrulous man whose block-like noggin begat the nickname Boxhead. Shaw thought the lights garish and extravagant. Boxhead thought they were a hoot.
Shaw’s renown made him one of the region’s most prestigious figures; PTA meetings like the one coming this afternoon never passed without a stream of mothers looking for a quick word with him. He spoke to each of them, and they loved him for it, but the exercise was time-consuming and required a measure of diplomacy that could be difficult to muster after a long day in a building filled with adolescents. Because of this demand on him and his teachers, he normally declared early dismissals on days the PTA met. Today he had made an exception. The district’s athletes and top students would spend the next two days competing against their rivals in nearby Henderson. Shaw declared Friday a holiday so the students not participating could cheer on their classmates. With no school the next day, he decided to keep the children in class today until their normal dismissal time of 3:30 p.m.
Shaw stood in front of his bedroom mirror and examined himself. His large, inquisitive eyes peered at his reflection from behind the round lenses of wire-framed glasses. Some students considered his eyes owlish and wise. Others saw them as forbidding and stern. If you were quick enough, you could catch a glint of humor, flash of approval, spark of kindness, or shadow of doubt.
Shaw carefully combed his hair and inspected his clothes, head to toe, in the dressing mirror. He wore his hair short on the sides, trimmed neatly up around his ears, and longish on the top. He shaved with a straight-razor.
The sun crested the horizon at 6:24 a.m. Shaw gathered his papers into a neat pile and looked up from his desk, through the window, toward his school. The pink glow from the sunrise washed over the building’s red-tiled roof. He heard his wife pad into the kitchen and his children—a grown daughter and teenage son—begin to shuffle sleepily in their rooms. Two other sons were grown and gone from home, and another daughter was living at a teaching academy in nearby Tyler.
Although his father had been a Confederate soldier during the Civil War, Shaw thought of himself a modern man who embraced change when clear reasoning supported it. Electric lights around a football field seemed a foolish way to spend good money, regardless of the school district’s wealth. The lightbulb burning in his study, though, obviously brightened his life with a convenience undreamed of when he was a farm boy squinting to read by the flickering fireplace and coal oil lamps. The house the school district provided to the superintendent also had the luxury of gas heaters and a gas-burning stove for his wife, Leila. The same gas line that fed the heaters in the high school and burners in the chemistry lab made it possible for Shaw and his family to take hot baths without the fuss and bother of building a fire and hauling kettles to the tub.
When he was a young man, a cold March morning like this meant Shaw would have to stoke up a blaze in the fireplace to take the chill off the house. Now, he had only to strike a match and light a heater. Amazing, the changes he’d seen in a lifetime. The superintendent stood with his back to the heater, soaking in the warmth and listening contentedly to the soft, evenly spaced whisper of flames in the grates.
4
Sweet Chariot
Lonnie Barber stepped outside onto the porch and stood still a few moments, taking in the morning. He always got started a little before daybreak, no matter the day of the week. His home was swept around by rural landscape the farmer held dear. Roosters crowed in every farmhouse yard. Here and there, a cowbell jangled, hogs grunted, a car door slammed. Whip-poor-wills whistled in the meadows.
Mixed in with ordinary sounds, the chugging resonance of oil-well pumps had by then become a mechanical rhythm so prevalent throughout the region that it no longer seemed disharmonious. By 1937 the droning pumps and steam whistles of locomotives and factories had become as commonplace as church bells on Sunday.
Barber left his home and drove his car down the same gravel and dirt roads he would be following shortly in the school bus—his part-time job. He saw oil lamps burning in the windows of his neighbors’ homes. Lanterns, carried by farmers and farm boys, swung along paths between the houses and barns.1 The morning’s most distinctive smell—an odor of smoke from fireplaces and kitchen stoves—traveled over rooftops throughout the scattered communities making up the school district. When Barber reached the campus, the high school and elementary school were still dark, but electric lights gleamed in the windows of Superintendent Shaw’s house, called the Teacherage.
Barber parked beside the bus barn and went about inspecting his bus. The school district owned a new fleet of tractor-trailer rigs for transporting more than a thousand students to the adjacent schoolhouses.
Other drivers arrived. Most, like Barber, were farmers supplementing their income by driving part-time for the school district. Barber poured a cup of coffee from his thermos and walked the full distance around his rig to make sure the tires were inflated properly. He checked the engine oil, cleaned the windshield, and took a look at the coupling between the truck and trailer. He glanced at his watch. It was about time to start his route, which included a swing back past his own house to pick up his sons, Arden, Burton, and L. V., and his daughter, Pearl. One of the first stops all the drivers made was at the house of a conductor assigned to the bus. Conductors were teachers who rode in the trailer, which was designed like a rail car. They supervised students’ conduct on trips to and from school. Conductors had to be firm because bus rides inspired more devilment than the schoolhouse, where teachers and principals kept their paddles handy. Two of the best conductors were math teachers John Propes and Lena Hunt, both forty-nine years old and strict disciplinarians. Propes’s reputation as a stickler for order and accuracy was so respected by his neighbors that he routinely was chosen to count votes after an election.2
Barber stepped on the crank button that started the engine, shifted into low gear, and pulled out onto the road. The sunrise, painting a wider expanse of sky now, gave promise of a magnificent day.
For children on the buses, the ride to school was a long and bouncy journey across rough roads that crisscrossed throughout the school district. Drilling derricks and oil wells dotted the countryside at every bend in the road. Sporadic, slender towers stood in what had once been cornfields or watermelon patches. Flames licked from their tops, burning constantly, devouring the fumes of waste gas produced while refining oil into gasoline.
The young travelers knew the flares as markers for whatever part of the sprawling oil field they were passing through because refineries, large and small, were located at strategic points along the pipelines to cash in on some of the enormous quantity of oil flowing up from the earth each day. Some of the children could see the flares at night from their bedroom windows.
Carolyn Jones saw something repulsive dancing in these fiery lights. They reminded her of the red glare that fanned the sky when a well burned out of control. Every child growing up in the oil patch knew of such fires—“hell with the lid off,” roughnecks called them. Several, each announced with an earth-shaking explosion, had occurred in New London. The fires would burn for weeks. Men died.
Men were always dying in the oil fields. Carolyn remembered a young man who came to her stepfather one night, hat in hand, to ask him for a job. Barely more than a boy, he’d married the previous year. The derrick man’s job posed risks, he knew, but he had a family now, the young man told Ervin Lowe. Ervin hired him. A few weeks later, the man fell to his death, on his first wedding anniversary. The aftermath—hushed, sorrowful conversations among the grown-ups, the mortal lessons, the risks these men would take the next morning—remained with Carolyn the rest of her life. She saw as heroes these men who faced forces they did not fully understand and came home exhausted and filthy with a modest paycheck in hand.3
The newspaper carried stories of roughnecks dying in odd ways: a thick wire cable snapped and its powerful backlash struck a roughneck like lightning; a pipe wrench accidentally slipped from a derrick worker’s hand and his friend working below the derrick was killed instantly when the 5-pound tool cracked his skull; a man operating a bulldozer backed the massive machine over another worker who had carelessly stepped into its path.
A few poor creatures actually drowned in the sludge pits at the base of the huge empty storage tanks. These men, the tank cleaners, worked on crude scaffolds just above the surface of the deep tar pools, painstakingly shoveling the sludge into buckets and removing it from the tanks. If a man’s foot slipped and he plunged into the pit, he would sink slowly into gluey sludge as thick as quicksand.4
Fire claimed the largest toll. Boilers blew. Dynamite blasted prematurely. Explosive chemicals were handled roughly. A stray spark could ignite a well, letting loose a thunderous roar.
One of the worst of these detonations struck New London early in the boom. Nearly everybody heard it. People ran from their homes and gazed at the sky. A column of brownish-black smoke towered over the community, and the smell of burning oil quickly
filled the air. Men jumped into their trucks and cars and hurried toward the site of the explosion. The first to arrive discovered that the owner of the well, Paul Vitek, and three of his employees had been blown to pieces.5 Firefighters struggled for weeks to control the monstrous blaze. Ash and soot littered the air and settled on the rooftops and lawns. They extinguished the fire, but reminders of its ferocity lingered day and night in the gas-burning flares.
5
Pleasant Hill
The morning light shone like bronze mist on hillsides and tops of pines. White, yellow, and pink wildflowers stirred in sandy beds along the roadside as the yellow school buses zoomed past. A haze lingered in the air just above the cemetery grass. The chilly morning relinquished the last of its dew as the sun bore down. The buses were rolling now, heading in both directions on the road that passed Pleasant Hill Cemetery.
The hilltop once belonged to Capt. Robert W. Smith, a veteran of the Texas Revolution. A marker shows his life spanned from 1814 to 1851—just thirty-seven years. Captain Smith rode with Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836, when Smith was twenty-two years old. General Houston’s victory there, some 180 miles south of the graveyard where Smith is buried, gave Texas independence from Mexico. The cemetery first served the Pleasant Hill Cumberland Presbyterian Church, a one-room building on the pine- and oak-covered hilltop, starting with the burial of Dewitt Smith in 1850. Beside Captain Smith’s grave lay buried warriors from the Civil War and the Great War.1
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