East Texas Oil Museum, Kilgore Texas

  On Saturday, I headed over to East Texas to look at some rocks in a backyard sale.  My husband and I were done looking or I should say I couldn't carry any more rocks and had to stop looking, around 3:30.  We decided to head back home. On the way to the sale we noticed signs for the East Texas Oil Museum  in Kilgore Texas.  Years before we had taken our kids to that museum and liked it a lot. On the way back my husband suggested we visit it again.  We got there at 4:00 an hour before closing.  We missed the last viewing of the movie but was able to enjoy everything else.
Here's some of the photos I took of the place that isn't in its web page.

 The front as you drive up to it.

 The wooden oil rig that sits out front of the museum

 More pictures of the wooden rig and how it was set up.  This is suppose to be a replica of the one that discovered the East Texas oil field.

 Some of the equipment that was used during that time

 I liked seeing this drill bit.  It was the deepest fishing job and went to a depth of 31,441 feet for the tune of  $6 million dollars.  I was amazed that they would go for recovering it and not abandoning that well.  No telling how much it cost to drill that deep.

 I liked seeing this sign that showed all the different products made from petroleum.  Sometimes I have a tendency to forget all the things that are derived from oil.

 A picture of Joiner and Lloyd the discoverers of the field.

 They had a wall with different people who where honor for their work in the Oil industry.

 I liked this display of belt buckles of the different companies that were involved in the area. 

 This was interesting showing the outline of the field.

 They had a display case of other economic rocks from the area. 

 I thought this display was really clever.  They had made quilted pictures using leather showing different oil traps.  The black was the oil. I saw this display in the gift shop area and was hoping they were for sale, but they weren't.  I wouldn't mind having some of these pictures in my home and said someone could make some money making replicas of these displays. 

This was a replica of a present day working rig.  I thought it was interesting to look at these and to see how some things are still the same while others have evolved over time.

They had a replica of a museum. I felt the display explaining this was weak and could use some work, especially if you didn't take the elevator ride or see the movie- after all it was suppose to be a replica of the museum and you think museums would talk about the geology of the area.. -- It was the geology in the area that made it so famous.
There was an Elevator ride that describe the geology that you go through to get to the pay zone. I thought it was a cute idea riding the elevator deep down into the earth. (You really didn't but they just rolled the display so it looked like you were).   Basically the they talked/showed the different formations: 
Queen City
Reckaw
Carizzo
Wilcox
 - Wilcox is important because it has lignite in it.(swamps and near shore material)
Midway Chalk - composed  mostly of forminifera (ocean deposits)At 1800 ft
Navarro Sandstone - @2200 ft
Marlbrook
Pecan Gap -@2800 ft
Brownstone @3100 ft
Austin Chalk @ 3400 ft which acts as the trapping mechanism.
Woodbine Sandstone @4200 ft - the pay zone
  ( they didn't talk about how old it was or what type of environment it was deposited in.  Just that it was a sandstone with a lot of space for the oil.)
Under the Woodbine is the Wichita Limestone which is probably the source rock for the oil.
They did talk about the Woodbine being pinched out and that forming the trapping mechanism, but very little about the Sabine uplift causing the pinchout.
The show was only 8 minutes long, and I know they kept it short to keep kids attention but I did feel like they could have made it maybe10 minutes long and added a bit more geologic information. It did mention that the East Texas field was a water drive field with the water pushing the oil up to the Woodbine pinchout against the Austin chalk.  The Austin chalk is a very tight formation and is mined in the south with it being a good source rock for making cement.

  The museum did a very good job of capturing the feel of what it would have been like to live in Kilgore during those early years of 1930's. I think when we saw it before, the kids liked to see how their grandparents lived.  They couldn't get over the fact there was no TV's or computers and just had radio and going out to the movies - things like that made very interesting to see. If you look at the website you can see the way the town was during that time.


After we were done at the museum we decided to drive around Kilgore.  They have a lot of interesting oil and gas things to see in the area.  I was draw by seeing all these derricks that were so close together.  Usually in the industry the closest wells can be is on 5 acre spacing and these were a lot closer than 5 acres.

 I couldn't imagine how they got so many rigs so close together.

Then we read the signs and found out that this was a replica of the richest acre in the world back when the East Texas Oil field was being developed in the early 1930's.  It was  because of wells being so close together like this that they started to regulate the spacing of wells to keep the integrity of the field going.

 I thought it made a nice little park to go and see.

Around the corner from this park was another park that kids could play at.  Called Christmas tree park.  It wasn't named for Christmas trees but the equipment that is used in drilling wells and keeping them from blowing out.

 Some other pictures of the Christmas tree park

And finally I just had to get a shot of the Texas Railroad Commission since I used to have to deal with them a lot back in my days of working in the oil industry.  I always thought it was such an unusual name for being in charge of regulating the oil industry.

Muse thought:  I wonder what it must have been like to own some acreage back in the early 1930's.  And how heartbreaking it must have been if you were on the otherside of the Woodbine pinchout.