Corsicana Oil Field

The Corsicana oil field, the first field in Texas to produce oil and gas in important quantities, was found by accident on 9 June 1894, when contractors drilling a water well for the city on South Twelfth Street struck oil sand at a little over 1,000 feet. The drillers, Horace G. Johnston, Elmer Akin and Charles Rittersbacher of the American Well and Prospecting Company, were infuriated. The oil had to be cased off to keep it out of the water, it went on seeping up around the casing, and the artesian water they wanted was not reached until 2,470 feet. Two local men and a Pennsylvania oilman formed the Corsicana Oil Development Company that September and brought in John H. Galey of Pennsylvania to drill. His first well, 200 feet south of the water well, was completed in October 1895 at 2½ barrels a day, and derricks then spread across the eastern part of town.

Corsicana oil soon flooded a small Texas market, and producers at times poured their surplus on the ground. That waste led, on 29 March 1899, to the first Texas law regulating the drilling, casing, plugging and abandoning of oil and gas wells. In 1897 town leaders invited the Pennsylvania oilman Joseph S. Cullinan to advise them; he contracted for 150,000 barrels at fifty cents a barrel and built storage tanks and a refinery, whose first shipment left on 24 February 1899. Primary production peaked in 1900 at 839,554 barrels, and until 1909 Corsicana produced most of the natural gas sold in Texas. Saltwater floods begun in the 1950s revived the old field, lifting output to 1,611,055 barrels in 1965, and by 1993 it had yielded nearly 44 million barrels by 1993. In 1977 the discovery well was described as a 6-inch pipe rising 3 feet from the ground in the Petroleum Industry Park.