Word: spindletops
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...florid West Virginian named Thomas Peter Lee started Yount-Lee Oil Co. at Beaumont, Tex. On an original capital of $50,000 they spent 13 years drilling in Texas and Louisiana without spectacular success. Then suddenly, in 1926, Yount-Lee made national news by rediscovering the famed Spindletop Field near Beaumont. Everybody supposed that Spindletop had been drained dry. Yount-Lee opened a rich new producing sand by drilling deeper than anybody had had the courage to go before. Later the company discovered and developed the High Island Field in Galveston County. Today Yount-Lee is the biggest independent...
...owned by the House of Mellon. The Mellons started Gulf Oil in 1901 with Pennsylvania's James Guffey, uncle of U. S. Senator-elect Joseph Guffey. It was then called the J. M. Guffey Petroleum Co. Guffey Petroleum went into the red when its wells in the fabulous Texas Spindletop field turned to water. By 1913 the Mellons had built Gulf Oil into a dividend-paying property. By 1929 its net income had averaged $25,000,000 a year for nearly a decade. It was the world's third largest producer of crude when William Larimer Mellon retired from...
...found this interest very annoying. Texaco has had a tradition of down right individualism ever since it was founded by John Warne ("Bet-a-Million") Gates & friends in 1902 - a longshot bet on a little $3,000,000 concern which had grown out of a wildcat gusher in the Spindletop pool. Ralph Holmes went to Texaco at its founding. Grandson of an oilman, he was raised in Olean, N. Y. near the Pennsylvania oil fields, quit school to go into refining. For Texaco he helped develop the famed Holmes-Manley gasoline cracking process, helped push its distribution into 51 foreign...
...Mellon and Frick. While all this was going on, one morning in 1901 a Jugoslav mining engineer punched a hole in a salt dome on the Texas plains and a huge fountain of oil such as man had never seen before spouted into the air. That well at Spindletop was to turn out more oil in the first three years than all the wells of Pennsylvania combined. It remade the oil business. Unable to cope with a financial find of such magnitude the Jugoslav and his backer called in Colonel Guffey of Pittsburgh. Guffey soon called in the Mellons. Andrew...