DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the New Deal Era in Kilgore. Now picture this. It's the 1930s, and word gets out that there's oil in Kilgore, Texas.
And I mean word gets out. Thousands of people — thousands — come pouring in, drawn by the promise of something better in the middle of a national depression that just kept deepening. What did they find when they got here?
Well, they found each other, mostly. And a whole lot of canvas. This site, right here, became a makeshift tent city.
A city of tents, stretching out as far as you'd care to look, full of folks who'd been displaced by hard times and were betting everything on black gold. Now, a tent city of thousands is one thing when it springs up overnight. Controlling what comes next — that's something else entirely.
By 1934, city officials had seen enough. They looked at this very site and decided it wasn't going to stay a patchwork of canvas and hope. They were going to make something of it.
Something ambitious. They chose it as the focus of a public works program, and what followed was a park project that included extensive rock work — the kind of craftsmanship that doesn't happen by accident. And it didn't happen in isolation either.
Other Federal New Deal projects were already underway in Kilgore at the time — the Kilgore Public Library, the Kilgore College Administration Building — and the planning and foresight behind those projects influenced what happened here. You can feel that thinking in the work: deliberate, built to last, meant to say something about what a community could be even when times were at their lowest. The park project was finished about 1936.
Out of a tent city born from desperation, Kilgore built something that stood. That right there is a story worth stoppin' for.
What the marker says
After the discovery of oil here in the 1930s, this site was transformed into a makeshift tent city by thousands of people displaced by a deepening national depression. In an effort to control growth, city officials chose this site as the focus of an ambitious public works program in 1934. The park project, which included extensive rock work, was influenced by the planning and foresight of other Federal "New Deal" projects underway in Kilgore at the time (Kilgore Public Library and Kilgore College Administration Building). The park project was finished about 1936.