DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker tells this one, and I'm just the voice carryin' it down the road. Now if you want to talk about a hole in the ground that changed everything, pull up a chair — because somewhere beneath Eastland County, Texas, in the summer of 1917, a drill bit started turning, and it did not stop for a long, long time. The well had a proper name: the J.H.
McCleskey No. 1 Discovery Well of the Ranger Pool. Warren Wagner was the man doing the drilling, working under the supervision of W.K. Gordon of the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company.
They broke ground on July 2nd, 1917, and that drill kept going — through summer heat, into the cooling days of fall — all the way to October 27th, 1917. Nearly four months of work, turning and pushing down into the earth. And then the earth answered back.
Initial production came in at sixteen hundred barrels — and three million feet of gas riding right along with it. That is not a trickle. That is not a suggestion.
That is the ground saying yes in a very loud voice. The well produced, and produced, and produced. Two hundred seventy-five thousand barrels of oil pulled up out of Eastland County before all was said and done.
That number deserves a moment of quiet respect. But every story has its last page. On May 30th, 1930, the J.H.
McCleskey No. 1 was abandoned. The drilling, the roar, the output — all of it stilled. Two hundred seventy-five thousand barrels, and then silence.
That's the whole bargain, right there in the ground beneath your feet.
What the marker says
The J.H. McCleskey No. 1 Discovery Well of the Ranger Pool was drilled by Warren Wagner under the supervision of W.K. Gordon of the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company, July 2-October 27, 1917. Initial production was 1600 barrels with three million feet of gas. Abandoned May 30, 1930 after producing 275,000 barrels of oil.