DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna give it to you straight with a little room to breathe. Somewhere out here in Stephens County, there's a story about a place that rose up fast, filled to the brim, and then went quiet as a Sunday morning — and the whole thing happened in less than three decades. The place was called Parks Camp.
It was founded in 1918 on the land of a rancher by the name of J.W. Parks, and the Texas Company — you might know them better as Texaco — built it out as a company town for their employees. Now, oil was discovered on Parks' land, and that discovery set off an economic boom in the area that you just about couldn't have planned for.
At its height, Parks Camp was home to around fifteen thousand people. Fifteen thousand. Out here.
Think about what that means — the building, the noise, the motion of it all. By the time the nineteen-twenties rolled around, this camp had a school, a bank, a post office, stores, a community hall, doctors, and rows upon rows of housing — individual homes and barracks-type quarters alike. It had everything a town needs to call itself a town.
Then the early nineteen-forties came along, and Parks Camp started to decline. By the end of World War II, it was completely abandoned. All that life, all those fifteen thousand souls — gone.
The land remembers, even when nothing else is left to tell it.
What the marker says
Founded in 1918 and named for rancher J.W. Parks, on whose land it was located, Parks Camp was a company town built for employees of the Texas Company (Texaco). The discovery of oil on Parks' land caused an economic boom in the area, and the Parks Camp at its height was home to about 15,000 people. By the 1920s the camp's facilities included a school, bank, post office, stores, community hall, doctors, and rows of individual and barracks-type housing. The town began to decline in the early 1940s and was completely abandoned by the end of World War II.