Ibex

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, there are places in West Texas that the land just swallows back up after a while — and Ibex, out here in Shackelford County, is one of them. But don't let the quiet fool you.

This ground has got a story underneath it. It starts the way so many Texas stories do — with cattle. For a good long while, this was ranch country, nothing but grass and sky and longhorns working the draws.

Then somebody stuck a drill in the earth, and everything changed. In 1919, the Ibex Oil Company drilled a successful well down into the Caddo Lime formation. That's the kind of sentence that sounds simple enough, but friend, it set off a chain of events that turned this quiet stretch of Shackelford County into something nobody around here had ever seen before.

Word travels fast when there's oil money involved. Soon, other drilling companies came pouring in, and wooden derricks started spreading for miles in every direction. Miles.

You stand out here now and try to picture that — the sky full of timber towers, the noise, the smell, the hustle. By 1921, Ibex had sold their leases to the Landreth Company. Ed Landreth didn't waste any time.

He built a gasoline refinery — and here's the detail that always catches people — water-powered, fed by a dam right there on Hubbard Creek. Lone Star Gas, Humble Oil, other companies followed, building facilities and dozens of employee homes. They were setting down roots, or trying to.

But a boomtown doesn't wait for the housing to catch up. Plenty of families never made it inside four walls at all. They slept in tents.

Some slept in open pastures. Just out under the stars, making do, because the work was here and the work was what mattered. And yet — and yet — out of all that chaos, a real community took shape.

By the nineteen twenties, Ibex had a school, a grocery, dry goods stores, hotels, cafes, and a central phone office. A post office opened in 1923 and ran all the way through 1953, thirty years of mail moving in and out of a place that the rest of the world might've barely noticed on a map. Then, the way it goes, the population fell.

The post office closed. The families moved on. The companies pulled out.

And the land — patient as it always is — started taking things back. Today, if you know where to look out here in Shackelford County, you'll find foundations still sitting in the dirt, and smokestacks still standing against the sky. Not much else.

Just the bones of what Ibex was — a boomtown that roared to life on a single successful well in 1919, built itself a whole civilization, and then went quiet again. Some places, the ground remembers even when everybody else forgets.

What the marker says

Oil drilling in the 1920s transformed this area from cattle ranches to a boomtown. In 1919, the Ibex Oil Co. drilled a successful well into the Caddo Lime formation. Soon other drilling companies came and wooden derricks spread for miles. In 1921, Ibex sold their leases to the Landreth Co. Ed Landreth built a gasoline refinery, water-powered by a dam on Hubbard Creek. Lone Star Gas, Humble Oil and other companies built facilities and dozens of employee homes. Other families slept in tents or open pastures. In the 1920s, the Ibex community had a school, grocery, dry goods, hotels, cafes, and a central phone office. The post office operated from 1923-53 before the population fell. Today, foundations and smokestacks remain from the industrial past of Ibex. (2013)