the way we now view him, to be his own man and not part of a block or a negotiating team. to treat his job very pragmatically and not as an academic seminar. above all, viewed in the best light, to treat his judicial office as a trust and not as an estate. thank you, ladies and gentlemen. [ applause ] this weekend, american history tv travels to beaumont, texas, where oil first poured out of the spindle top gush erin january, 1901. ushering in the petroleum age and changing the story of the city and our country forever. will he indicated 90 miles east of houston, 30 miles inland from

gulf of mexico on the naches river, beaumont is home to almost 120,000 people, lamar university, and has the remnants of the oil industry in operation here today. >> we are fortunate to have a partner. >> coming up, we explore the area's past as we take you to the site where oil was first disdofrd in texas and to the glad is city boomtown mu super where the discovery of oil is depektd. we will carry the story forward, going to crockett street and dixie hotel, to learn about the outgrowth of the boom era. and to the downtown federal courthouse where landmark civil rights cases were argued, including one that involved a group of african-american

golfers suing to get the city's white golf course opened up. those stories and many more as american history tv travels to beaumont's historic sites to tell the varied, unique history of the city and surrounding area. >> literally in one gusher at spindle top, we outproduced russian oil fields for the year in just a matter of ten days, and it made the united states number one in the world in terms of oil production, and it was this well that did that. this is a monument that was first put up in the early 1940s

to mark the place the spindle top gusher, the biggest gush gusher in the united states as of 1901, that's the site it came in. everyone knows about the drake well. the first well that was actually drilled in u.s. history in 1859, right before the civil war. then as soon as that war was over, people started drilling all over the place. they were finding oil in a number of places but in small quantities by comparison to what was going to happen here. this well actually got started very early after the civil war. some local men got the right to drill in a number of places around here, and this salt dome as the rock broke up around the salt piercement. oil collected around the edges

of it. and in the case of this salt dome, no one knew this really, but they were going to find a huge quantity of oil right on the top of the dome. that's not the most ordinary thing. a lot of people lost money trying to find oil on the top of those domes because this was so huge. so there were four wells drilled that were dry e wells collapsed with sand or people ran out of money, all kinds of things were happening. but the person who brought in the fifth well was captain anthony lucas, he is croatian. he decided to visit an uncle in the united states and finally decided simply not to go back. he came here and saw signs that were indicating there was going to be salt and sulphur and oil located on this salt dome, too.

ultimately, lucas got leases to drill over here, and the fourth well was his. and he is the one that drilled the fourth hole, a dry casing the well, and he lost everything he had. he had used his own money on that. and he had no more. so to drill a fifth one, he was going to have to require major sacrifice from his family, and they were going to have to do serious borrowing. he just couldn't find anyone that had faith. he had faith in himself, but he couldn't find any geologists that thought he even had the beginning of a good idea, until he got to the university of texas, and welcome battle phillips believed in him, sent him to corsicana to talk to jane galey. he was a wealthy wild cater who

worked with the mellen banks house in pittsburgh. he came here and took a look, and he thought there was something here. and he discovered so many oil strikes all over the country, that he talked the mel enbanking house into putting up $300,000 to drill another well. now, to do that, lucas had to give up major control of that well because he didn't have the money. they went ahead and started drilling, and they drilled right on this location. the drillers were characters that totally fascinated me. they were three brothers, the hamill brothers. it was adventure after adventure. those drillers had ways to drill through the formations on top of the hill. they started in october of 1900. and they got down to rock right before christmas, and they all

went home for the holiday, and they came back and just started putting everything back in the ground again, and they dropped e and started drilling and the drill bit got caught crevace. they tried everything to get it out. they promised to go to 1200 feet. they were at 1020, trying to go down to 1200. and they got about 700 feet of pipe into the hole, and all of a sudden, the whole derrick started shaking, the ground shook. first, water came out of the me a horrible mess. and then it quieted down. water a began bursts and rock,

pieces of rock coming out. fortunately no one got hurt, it is a miracle, but they waited after it calmed down and they went out and they were standing on the platform, the derrick platform, and our favorite driller, al hamill, that guy was so interesting, he was the youngest, the single guy, he comes over and there's this hole. and he hears something, the drill pipe, 700 feet of it had blown out of the ground into the air, broken up in pieces, was laying all over the place. but he was looking down the hole, and all of a sudden he could see the oil, and it came up, and then it went back down. then it came up again, and went back down. kept coming up a little more every time. al hamill said it looked as though the oil was breathing.

in the long run, wish he had said it looked like the earth was breathing. this oil was coming closer and closer. finally it ran over top of the derrick flower, and then all of a sudden it blew again, and when it blew again, it was a stream of oil. they weren't sure highway to cap it. for ten days, it just blew and literally, you had all this oil, and it was here, and most of it drained off in a western direction. there's a railroad track over there, and it was there when the spindle top gusher came in. anyway, they backed it up to the railroad track, through earth and dykes around it, then thought what are we going to do. literally, they got between 750,000 and a million barrels of oil out of that well in just ten

days. two the hamill brothers that capped it. they invented a way to cap the well. it was on the tenth day there was enough freedom from rock bursts to go ahead and clamp down what's now called a christmas tree. they're using the oil all over the country. they invented it. put it together, clamped it off, closed that well down, then stood back and looked. there was oil everywhere, in the air, all over the ground, all over. the derrick stood up to it. i think it is nothing short of amazing it did. well, you can imagine the rush was on. in the next two months, they drilled five more wells. i guess by april they had five in all, and they were all gushers. so what happened is that we realized how much oil truly was available. lucas worked in the field about

six months, then he sold his interests out, and the big companies, gulf, texaco, sun came in and started working the field. it really wasn't so much the little guy once those companies came in in the first year. >> oil production at spindle top field began to decline in 1903. a second boom hit the oil field in 1925 and lasted until beginning of the great depression. small scale oil production continues at spindle top today. >> all weekend long, american history tv joins our cable partners to show case the history in lit rather culture. beaumont founded in 1835 is 80 miles east of houston, 30 mild inland from gulf of mexico. you're watching american history tv on cspan3.

gladys city as we call it, it was part of the boom town -- by 1976, there was nothing left of what was the original gladys city, which was just across the highway from us about a half mile, so as a project for the bicentennial, it was a project to try and preserve the history and memory of gladys city. gladys city is named for a young man in a sunday school class, we call him our dreamer, he's the one that came one a lot of the ideas for gladys city, and home run name was gladys bingham, and she was in his sunday school class and he was very smitten by her and he named the city for her.

when petillo originally envisioned the city, it was really what he called -- or what could be called an industrial utopia. by the time spindle top came in in 1901, i like to say that there was no more time to be perfect and his other dreams really focused on this manufacturing part. and i think that's probably what some people wouldn't realize is even they didn't know how much oil was under the ground out there. it surprised everybody when it came in. >> beaumont at that time was kind of rough and tumble and so he wanted something that was pristine and clean and that's actually not what he got.

but that's the way it works sometimes. the gladys oil and manufacturing company was the first oil company in texas. they're still in operation today. they still have interests out in spindle top field. so they really put the engine behind trying to search for this oil. we'll just go in and take a look at a couple of things. what patilla higgins' vision was for gladys city, with the photographer, they platted out the city and there was much given to the gladys city oil and manufacturing company. there were places for homes and schools and what he believed would be the oil fields and manufacturing areas. if you look up here at the top, you'll see this, this is a picture of gladys bingham. as a child. and then right next to it, you can see that the vision was more about manufacturing and an

industrial area than it was about oil production. i will say that after the lucas gusher came in, their stock certificates and letterhead changed very quickly to have the oil dericks out there in the oil field because their purpose changed very quickly when the well came in. >> why didn't this vision ever come to fruition? >> well, i think when you had so many people rushing in and, you know, everybody wanted to make their dollar on this huge event that was coming, and if you think about it, especially in this area, just a few months prior, was the big galveston hurricane in september of 1900, a lot of people came from galveston when they heard about this because they were still trying to recover from that hurricane and so this was a chance for people to come and set up businesses and -- or work in the field and try to make some money. now it didn't -- as i have said, it didn't turn out that way, to be this perfect city. this is a drawing that

represents -- from a photograph that was done and you'll see that it -- those buildings went up very quickly and looks very much like what we have here today. >> was it a safe place to be? >> gladys city, i understand was fairly safe. there were people trying to make their money, while there were honest people and there were dishonest people here, so you did have to watch out for card sharks and confidence men and things like that, that would have tried to get money from -- you know, a lot of these men that came here probably came off of farms so they hadn't been in a city, even the size of beaumont, so they really had to be careful. that was gladys city, out on spindle top hill, where you were really in the middle of the oil field, it could probably get pretty rough.

there are stories that it could get rowdy and people did lose their lives a couple of times just because -- you know, through fights and that kind of thing, so, it was more the wild section and then gladys city was kind of off the way from the city. beaumont had its own oil exchange for stock exchange for a time. this is the build that represents that stock exchange. there were over 600 oil companies that were incorporated after the big boom and when the gusher came in. and so, the trading floor, the a --actualuch larger than this accommodate the trading floor, this picture up here gives you some idea of what the original looked like. so they would be trading stock in the front. in the back of the building, you had a print shop, that was printing stock just as quickly

as they could for all of these oil companies. and, you know, some of that stock was good and some was not good. but i was talking to a printer the other day, and, you know, that's not the printer's job to decide, so they were churning it out as quickly as they could. so while all these buildings are replicas, they do represent the buildings that were operating in the city at that time. this is gibson's dry goods store, this is where you would come to get clothing or your sewing needs, that kind of thing. women still made their own clothes at the time. they would purchase their undergarments and that kind of thing, but you could get purchase -- most men at this time would come in and purchase their shirts and, you could actually buy jeans, denim jeans to wear to work. and the women would have probably had a, you know, a day

dress, maybe one sunday dress, and then same thing for men, they would have had their work clothes and then probably one nice, white starch shirt for church and they would have had to get their starched collars to go with that shirt. now if you had a little more money, you would have a derby hat or a top hat to wear to church or to nicer functions. i think people would be surprised by how much some of these pieces actually cost back then. for instance, you know, on a cold day in january, you would have had to have your union suit, which is like a tighter fitting pair of what we now call long johns, but for $2 or $3, men and women could get their union suits. this is a copy of the sears &

roebuck catalog from just before the boom. so this is what people would have been ordering from, either through the dry goods store, people could order just about anything from sears & roebuck. farm equipment, you would go to the general store, have it shipped in on the train. everything that i heard about patilla higgins and what motivated him was to be somebody. i think he had a real need to find his place in history and to do big things and to do great things. and, sometimes, he made it, even later in life, he continued to wildcat for oil, going out to all over texas, to find new well sites, many of them are still producing today that he found, and spent most of his life trying to convince people in different parts of texas that,

for sure there was oil. so he was on -- i would almost call it a personal crusade to be believed, to be taken seriously about his ideas and to be respected. while most of our collection into early 1900, we do dip a bit into the 1920s and 1930s with a few really special pieces. this is a 1931 model a ford that belonged to patilla higgins, he drove it for nearly 25 years after he drove his model t for over 25 years. so he drove this car all over texas as he continued to search for oil and wildcat different wells all throughout the state. i believe it's not on there

i believe it's not on there any more, but he actually had the steering wheel modified, you know, because patillo only had one arm. he actually lost an arm in a fight with a sheriff's deputy. you know, we talk about patillo being the big dreamer, but in his younger days, patillo would have been what you would like to call a rounder, he liked to get into fights, carry guns and shoot guns, and one night he got into quite a scrape with a deputy sheriff, shot and actually killed the sheriff and in the process was shot in the arm and lost his arm.

he converted, became a sunday school teacher, became the patillo that we know. came in beaumont around 1951 for the 50th anniversary, and by that time, i believe he was 81, in his early 80s. he was about 88 i think when he passed away. so he got to see the full stretch of all the different things that happened at spindle top over his lifetime. the spindle top field began to play out after three or four years. production started really dropping. so, you know, gladys city remained out there. people began to build housing, especially here in south beaumont, then by late 1920s, we had the second boom, and with new technology, they came and drilled on the perimeter of the

salt dome, which is what spindle top, the hill was at one time. so that caused a second boom that brought new life to gladys city and beaumont. then that kind of wained. then companies were mining sulphur out of spindle top. after that, that's when it kind of dwindled away. people, there was really no major production out there. the booms were over. people began moving away, moving into beaumont proper and glad is city deteriorated. by the 1960s, there were efforts to create a museum and making sure things were preserved. by the mid 70s, they built the replica of gladys city. >> we are on forsyth streemt in downtown beaumont, texts.

this was one of the center points of the violence during the race riot of 1943. this was world war ii home front town where there was much business activity being produced for goods for the world war ii effort. home front industries created new jobs and also created new tensions that in some cases resulted in race riots. there were race riots in detroit and harlem and i think mobile and beaumont, texas. in june of 1943, there was this very sad, tragic episode in beaumont, a race riot broke out here june the 15th, 1943. there was a story about a black man having raped a white woman. when this story spread into the

shipyard, several thousand shipyard workers, some say at least 2,000 shipyard workers came out of the shipyard, came downtown to the city hall and to the police department and to try tow find the person who had allegedly committed this crime. and they found no one. from there, they broke up into groups and roamed through black parts of town, including forsyth street where we're standing. it was a vibrant black business community with lawyers and doctors and pharmacists, insurance agents, retail stores. there was a movie theater here. so it was a vibrant black business community. and some of these men in the mob attacked this neighborhood. they attacked some of the people. they tore up some of the

automobiles, and they attacked some of the businesses. there were three lives lost, two black people, one white person. so there were three deaths, and the beaumont police department energized itself quickly. the national guard was mobilized, and texas rangers came to town also. the worst of the violence was over within 24 hours. the town was put under marshall law, and so it was a brief, ugly episode in a time for the town when it was doing very well, and when many people had new jobs and there was new money, new prosperity. it was a tragic thing for beaumont in a time of growth an street in downtown beaumont in front of a row of

buildings that were probably built around the turn of the 20th century. they were built along the railroad track where the railroad came through town, so they were an important part of the business district there. at some point, parts of crockett street became more notorious than mainstream establishments. beaumont had always turned a blind eye more or less to prostitution, as long as it was in some remote corner of the town. however, this was not, andt the became a brothel. but it was considered to be a very fine one. the clientele was limited, the employees there were supposed to be the prettiest girls around. anybody off the street could

walk in and patronize. miss rita was the madam at the hotel. she started life in one of the brothels in town, ended up marrying the son of the owner, his name was matt ainsworth. they together operated another houn then she took the money that was left in the estate, and bought the dixie, and it was hers for years until it was closed down. patron of the to the dixie dixie, which was a bore dell oh, you would comeor i and up these stairs. and when you got to the there w been a counter there. and he would have checked in at that point. we're now in the interior of what would have been the dixie hotel, the