The Strake-Gray Oilfield House, a house on the grounds of the Heritage Museum of Montgomery County in Conroe, was home to the superintendents of George Strake's Conroe oilfield. It was built in 1938, and the museum believes it was ordered from a Sears, Roebuck catalogue, shipped by rail in pieces and put together in the field near FM 1314, southeast of Conroe. Harvey Lee, the first superintendent, lived in it, and Clyde "Dolly" Gray, the second, raised his family there. It came to the museum in 2015, given by the Gray family, to tell the story of the oilfield and the people who lived on it. The field it served made Conroe an oil town. Major companies had surveyed the area and found nothing, but Strake, a young wildcatter, spudded his first well on 30 August 1931 and found gas and condensate at about 5,000 feet in December.
His second well flowed 900 barrels of oil a day in 1932 and proved the field. By the end of 1933 the field had 679 wells, and Conroe's population, about 2,457 in 1931, was put at 10,000 by 1938. A member of the Montgomery County Historical Commission has said Conroe had more millionaires per capita in the 1930s than any other city in the country.
The field's most famous well, Harrison and Abercrombie's No. 1 Alexander, blew out and cratered in 1933, at times spilling nearly 11,000 barrels a day, before Humble paid $300,000 for the right to kill it. The crater was estimated at 600 feet deep. By 1993 the field had produced more than 717 million barrels.
Getting there
30.3215, -95.4726
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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