DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna give it to you straight with a little Gregg County seasoning. Two old pumping units are sitting right here in Kilgore, and they've got a story worth pulling over for. It starts, as so many east Texas stories do, with a single well.
December 28th, 1930 — you can mark that date in your memory — a well known as the Lou Della Crim No. 1 blew in. And just like that, Kilgore became part of the great east Texas oil field. The boom had begun.
Now, word travels fast when there's oil in the ground, and sure enough, by 1931 the Shell Pipe Line Corp. had already made their move. They brought in two reciprocal pumps — manufactured by a company called Allis-Chalmers, first used out in west Texas — and set them to work right here. Their job was about as straightforward as jobs get: take that crude oil and move it all the way down to the Houston area refineries.
Simple purpose. Extraordinary outcome. Here's the part that'll make you sit back in your seat.
Those two pumps kept running. And running. And running — all the way until 1985.
By the time they finally stopped, it's estimated they had pumped a combined total of over one billion barrels of oil between them. One billion. Let that number stretch out across the miles of Texas highway in front of you for a second.
These weren't monuments when they started. They were workhorses. They became monuments by showing up, every single day, for decade after decade.
Now they stand as historic reminders of what Kilgore was at its wildest, its loudest, its most wide-open — a genuine oil boom town. The Lou Della Crim No. 1 blew in and started something. These two old Allis-Chalmers pumps finished a chapter nobody quite expected to be that long or that large.
One billion barrels. Not bad for a couple of machines that started their lives in west Texas and just kept on going.
What the marker says
These two early pumping units serve as historic reminders of Kilgore's development as an oil boom town. The boom era began on Dec. 28, 1930, when the well known as the Lou Della Crim No. 1 blew in. With it, Kilgore became part of the great east Texas oil field. These reciprocal pumps, manufactured by Allis-Chalmers and first used in west Texas, were brought here in 1931 by the Shell Pipe Line Corp. to move crude oil to Houston area refineries. In service until 1985, it is estimated they pumped a combined total of over one billion barrels of oil. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986