"A place called Spindletop..."

On January 10, 1901, an oil well came in at a place called Spindletop just outside Beaumont. The oil well was a gusher, spewing forth more than 75,000 barrels of oil a day. The great oil boom was on. Soon producing 100,000 barrels of oil per day, the gusher tripled the nation’s oil production and set off a frenzy of oil drilling. Beaumont, a town of about 9,000 in January, turned into a boomtown of 30,000 by March.  This development did not go unnoticed by ex-Governor J. S. Hogg.

Early in 1901 Hogg did two things: With James W. Swayne, a Fort Worth lawyer friend, he formed the Hogg-Swayne Syndicate to invest in lands at Spindletop. To enlarge their capital, they invited three other men—Judge Robert Brooks, A. S. Fisher, and William T. Campbell—to join the Syndicate. They bought 15 acres of land at Spindletop, and since prospective buyers were eager to pay thousands of dollars for a fraction of an acre just large enough to drill a well on, the Syndicate was soon free of debt and reaping handsome profits. By 1902 there were 600 oil companies, 285 oil wells, and Spindletop was a forest of oil derricks.

The second thing that Jim Hogg did in 1901 was to buy an old plantation in Brazoria County. The “Patton Place,” as it was known, had a colorful history long before Hogg bought it. Located about 50 miles south of Houston, with lush green fields and magnificent oak trees, it was one of Stephen F. Austin’s original land grants to 300 Texas settlers in 1824. The first owner was Martin Varner, who sold it in 1834 to Columbus Patton, who brought his family and his slaves (one of whom was his mistress) from Kentucky. The plantation (now Varner-Hogg Plantation Historical Site, and well worth a visit) declined after the Civil War, and eventually was acquired by the New York and Texas Land Company, from whom J. S. Hogg purchased it in 1901. He got a good price: 4,100 acres for $30,000, or about $7.00 per acre. In today’s dollars that would come to over $783,000.

         Hogg's oil syndicate merged profitably with J. S. Cullinan's Texas Fuel Company (later Texaco), and ex-Governor Hogg reveled in his new-found affluence. There were happy times at "the Varner," which Hogg had bought because he believed there was oil under the land. When made his will in 1905 he ordered that the Varner property not be sold until 15 years after his death. He died in 1906, and he was right about the oil. In 1917--eleven years after J. S. Hogg’s death--the first big oil well came in at Varner. Other wells soon followed, and By 1920 the field at Varner was producing an income of about $225,000--per month.

         

For Will, Ima, Mike, and Tom, money worries were a thing of the past.