DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, Thurber, Texas — there's a town with more lives than a barn cat, and New York Hill is proof of that. This particular chapter starts in 1917, when a man named W.
K. Gordon discovered the Ranger oil field. That discovery changed the math for the Texas and Pacific Coal Company in a hurry.
They expanded into the burgeoning oil industry, and with a new game in town, they needed new players. So the company rebranded — came 1918, they were calling themselves the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company — and they went all the way to New York to recruit staff for their new oil division. Those folks packed up and came to Thurber, and somebody had to put them somewhere.
So the company built thirty-one houses, right up on the hill above town. And that's the hill we're talking about. New York Hill.
Now, this wasn't some dusty back lot. Church Street climbed the hill from town below. Sidewalks ran up the grade.
Brick steps, too — real ones, solid ones — connecting this little outpost of transplanted New Yorkers to the rest of Thurber's world. You can picture it on a Sunday morning: folks picking their way down those brick steps, heading to services, the whole hill alive with the kind of ordinary life that doesn't announce itself but fills a place up just the same. And then the 1930s came.
The company town was dismantled, and when it went, the buildings on New York Hill went with it. Those thirty-one houses — gone. But here's the thing about brick steps: they don't always get the memo.
Decades later, some of those steps and sidewalks were still visible, stubborn little remnants holding their ground, as if the hill itself wasn't quite ready to forget the people who once climbed it.
What the marker says
This area of Thurber developed after 1917, when the Texas and Pacific Coal Company expanded into the burgeoning oil industry following W. K. Gordon's discovery of the Ranger oil field. Renamed in 1918, the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company brought staff for its new oil division to Thurber from New York. Thirty-one houses were built here on New York Hill. Church Street climbed the hill from town, as did sidewalks and brick steps, some of which were still visible decades later. The buildings on the hill were removed in the 1930s when the company town was dismantled. (1995)