First we went to the east Texas oil museum in Kilgore. It was great! We watched several videos about oil drilling and the oil finds in east Texas in the early 30's. Below are some photos.
This is a replica of an oil drilling rig from the 1930's. It is in front of the museum.
This is "main street" Kilgore as it was in the early 30's. When the 2nd well came in the population of Kilgore grew from 800 to 8,000 in 24 hours. Right after the first wells came in it started raining and things were a sea of mud for quite some time.
Photo quality sucks, sorry. I bet PETA would have a cow if they saw these stuffed mules. They were quite lifelike.
These are steel derricks that once stood in the "worlds richest acre". Now there are rules about how close wells can be to one another but at one time there were 24 wells on 10 lots owned by 6 different people. This acre has produced over 2.5 million barrels of crude. There were more than 1,000 wells in downtown Kilgore. Since 1930 the east Texas oil field has produced over 5 BILLION barrels of oil. It is expected to keep producing for at least another 40 years.
One point the museum kept making is that people don't realize how dependent we are on oil. Some of the things I remember are:
That bowl of oatmeal some people have for breakfast required 4 ounces of crude to get it to your table.
Every pound of Starbucks coffee you use required a pound of crude to get it to you.
A stick of butter requires 2 ounces of crude to get it in your hand.
A bottle of water required 1 ounce of crude to get it in your hand.
An interesting tidbit, especially in light of Obama's refusal to allow a pipeline to be built to move Canadian oil to US refineries, was that the great socialist Roosevelt had a pipeline built between east Texas and east coast refineries in less than a year. In 1941 the federal government was concerned that German U-boats could slow down shipments of crude to the east coast. In June of 1942 the War Powers Board approved the project. Work on the pipeline began in August. In February 1943 crude was moving through the pipeline to Norris City, IL. By August 1943 crude was being delivered to New York City.
TransCanada claims that the pipeline is "shovel ready" and that it will bring $20 billion of investment into the United States, along with 20,000 construction jobs. The State Dept has "studied" the trans-Canada for years and even though they can't come up with a good reason to prevent it from being built. Obama has told them to keep doing studies, thus delaying the start of construction, until them can cook up some reason for not allowing the pipeline to be built. Maybe Obama's problem is that he can't claim to be the "messiah" who had provided 20,000 jobs at no expense to taxpayers.
We left Kilgore and drove secondary roads to Longview, TX. While travelling through Longview Kathy spied a Kroger store so we stopped and got our flu shots, then on to Marshall, TX. We arrived in Marshall about 4 PM. We had almost two hours of daylight to walk around before it got dark. Marshall goes all out for Christmas.
This place was an "outlet" craft store. It had a mezzanine and also a full 2nd floor. I took this photo while standing on the mezzanine level, at the top of the stairs.
This is a used book reading area at the back of the mezzanine.
The 2nd floor was devoted to art works.
This lady taking a bubble bath was in the storefront of another store. The "sign" behind the tub are the words to the song "Santa Baby."
This is probably as close to a toboggan slide as you can get in east Texas. The entire structure appeared to be air supported.
The courthouse was beautiful. We watched a light show where the lights switched on and off, and changed colors. The changes were sync'd to music.
We then drove the self-guided tour route to see a lot of other light displays in the town.
After that it was back to Lindale for supper at Italian Cafe and on home. Both our meals were excellent.
Good night to all and may God bless you and yours.
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