Word: cottingham
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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George L. Cottingham, Jr. '49--Frances Hopkins (Wellesley...
...hawked his papers to the leasehounds who make their fairweather "offices" around his newsstand. Atop the building, in the swank Beacon Club, the talk of better heeled oilmen was the same: "Carter brings in new pool . . . she's bubbling out of the hole right now." For the Cottingham mud had tested 50% good crude, 50% mud and drilling water-no salt. By week's end the new well flowed at the rate of 150-175 bbl. a day, was closed down for another gun perforation at 10,640 ft. A second Carter test hole a few miles away...
Though Carter men were coy, oil-wise Oklahomans were sure that the Cottingham was a "commercial" well, i.e., could produce enough oil to recoup lifting costs and then some, though not necessarily enough to pay off the $200,000-plus drilling costs. And Oklahoma's Ickes-feuding Senator Edward H. Moore, home to help out fellow Republicans in this week's Congressional election, was quick to say the Cottingham showed what "American free enterprise" could do, without any newfangled Government pipelines in far-off Arabia...
...Nothing. But what really titillated the industry was that oil from the Cottingham may be the beginning of the end of a weary search for a vast new northwestern Oklahoma oilfield in what geologists long ago named the Anadarko Basin. Though seismograph crews have swarmed over the basin for eleven years, dynamiting and painstakingly recording the sound waves that came back to their earphones, its area and oil content are still unknown. Until the Cottingham came in on the east flank of the basin, Anadarko produced little but "dry hole money"-the cash that oil companies advance to an enterprising...
Whether the field turns out to be oil or nothing, 69-year-old Farmer Cottingham is sitting pretty. With his own 390 acres, plus his two daughters' 320, he has royalty rights to a rich chunk of the Carter leasehold. Last week, in overalls and rubber boots, Farmer Cottingham phlegmatically cleared ground for more corn and cotton. But the gossips in Oklahoma City whispered that he had already been offered $10,000 for the royalty rights to a mere ten of his 710 acres...