Texon: Legacy of an Oil Town (review)

Now but a memory, between 1920 and 1960 company camps were a familiar part of southwestern oil-field life. Camps offered oil company personnel, especially those working in fields remote from population centers, a comfortable alternative to the tents and shacks typical of oil-field housing. Providing solidly built bungalows and modern utilities at very low prices, companies also supplied recreational and social amenities to oil field families. In return, employers could hope that camps would build employee loyalty to the company, reinforce identification with company culture, and thus help retain skilled, experienced field managers and workers.

By far and away the grandest oil company camp in West Texas was the Big Lake Oil Company's community at Texon, in the Reagan County Big Lake oil field, the community where co-author Jane Spraggins Wilson grew up. As the Wilsons describe, Texon, the brainchild of Big Lake Oil Company president Levi Smith, went beyond the usual parameters of company camps to be a virtually complete small town. Launched in 1924, it had an elementary school, hospital, community church, cafe, drugstore, post office, boarding house, filling station, grocery store, and barber shop. Recreational facilities included a golf course (with "greens" of oiled sand), swimming pool, club house, and baseball stadium. Big Lake Oil, like many larger companies of the twenties and thirties, sponsored a semi-professional company baseball team, the Texon Oilers, whose triumphs delighted their company fans. Labor Day featured a company barbecue commonly serving over a thousand people; Christmas brought parties and gifts for all employees' children. In short, Texon offered a way of life. The Wilsons note that in the Depression, when many communities struggled with unemployment, Texon workers lived well: with ample reason, the Wilsons term this period in Texon's history "the good years" (37).

The authors emphasize, however, that the good years did not outlast the end of World War II. Texon's existence was tied to drilling and production in the Big Lake oil field, and by 1945 much of the field was drilled up and production was declining. Plymouth Oil took over Big Lake Oil's operations in 1956, and it shifted most employees to other regional fields and relocated management to Midland. In 1962, Marathon Oil bought out Plymouth and ended Texon's existence as a company community.

The Wilsons have put together a superb collection of Texon photographs, the most extensive ever published on a single oil company camp. The great variety of the photographs and their lengthy explanatory captions take the reader back to the daily reality of company camp life, and for many Texans this will provide a wonderful trip down memory lane. From a scholar's point of view, the only area which might have benefited from more exploration is how the Texon experience fit in more general oil industry context. For example, though Texon's demise was in part the result of waning field activity, after 1950 most oil companies phased out camps because they were expensive and increasingly unnecessary. Texon's fate was thus typical of more general industry conditions. Still, as a window on a type of life once experienced by thousands of southwestern workers, Texon is a most welcome addition to industry and regional history.