DUANE
Duane's take
The way the marker tells it, and the marker's the authority here, this is the story of Greenvine's gas discovery. About two miles northwest of where you're rolling right now, something happened in 1879 that nobody planned and everybody should've noticed a whole lot sooner. A farmer named William Seidel — and this man wore a lot of hats, mind you, he was a grist mill owner, a cotton gin owner, a merchant, and a farmer all at once — William Seidel was doing something about as ordinary as it gets.
He was trying to dig a water well. That's it. No grand scheme.
No geological survey. Just a man who needed water. He got down to about a hundred and six feet, and instead of water, he struck natural gas.
Now, the marker calls this apparently the first use of natural gas for fuel in the entire state of Texas. That's a word worth sitting with — apparently — because history has a way of being stubborn about certainty. But apparently, yes, William Seidel, digging for something to drink, stumbled into something that would change this state forever.
He piped that gas to a nearby farmhouse, and Texas had its first taste of what was underneath it all. Fast-forward to 1967, when this marker was set down, and here's what that one accidental well had grown into: production of gas and oil spread to two hundred and ten Texas counties. Twenty-seven pipeline companies exporting gas.
An annual rate of production of about eight trillion cubic feet — that's trillion, with a T, let that number just hang in the air a moment. Texas holding forty-two point three percent of all the proven gas reserves in America. And sitting out there somewhere, a well nineteen thousand eight hundred and ninety-five feet deep, believed at the time to be the deepest well on the entire planet Earth.
All of it tracing a line, more or less, back to a farmer who just needed water.
What the marker says
(2 mi. Northwest) Apparently the first use in Texas of natural gas for fuel occurred in 1879 near here. William Seidel, a farmer, grist mill and cotton gin owner, and merchant, trying to dig a water well, struck gas at approximate depth of 106 feet. The gas was piped to a farmhouse nearby. Production of gas and oil has spread to 210 Texas counties; 27 pipeline companies export gas. Annual rate of production is about 8 trillion cubic feet. Texas has 42.3 per cent of the proven gas reserves in America, and it has a 19,895-foot well, believed to be world's deepest. (1967)