Map of Giddings Subdivision, Throckmorton Co. Sch. Land in Upton County Tex

Ft. Worth: Standard Blue Print Map Company, 1928. Very good.. Blueline map, 24.75 x 20.75 inches. Old folds, minor toning, extensive manuscript notations and hand coloring. An unrecorded Texas oil map showing the richness of a plot of the oil field in Upton County, Texas that was ostensibly assigned as the Thorckmorton County School Land. The map shows claims and mineral rights of a field particularly rich in oil, owned by such aggressively entrepreneurial companies as Phillips Petroleum Co., Empire Gas & Fuel Co., Roxana Petroleum, Marland, Humble, White Eagle, Amerada Petroleum Co., Corzelius Bros., Transcontinental Oil, and the Texas Pacific Coal & Oil Company. Numerous plots of land are either noted in pen and pencil manuscript or colored in various shades to indicate competing ownerships. Various notations in the margins regarding terms for the land sales indicate the map very likely belonged to an employee of a real estate concern.

"In 1926 George McCamey's wildcat brought 700 hopeful people to the area and established a new town in the southwest corner of Upton County named for the oil discoverer. The opening of the Yates oilfield especially helped to develop Upton County's economy.... Yates No. 1-A was brought in on October 28, 1926, flowing at 450 barrels daily, and later Yates No. 30-A became the largest gusher in the world, with a flow of 200,000 barrels a day. McCamey field operators gained a railroad spur from the Santa Fe Railroad, which had taken over the Orient Railroad, to aid development and encourage growth of the new town. By late 1927 several thousand people lived in McCamey. Water had to be freighted from Alpine, 100 miles distant, and was sold at one dollar per barrel until 1929, when good water from the Trinity sands wells seventeen miles away was piped into the town...largely because of oilfield activity, the population grew dramatically during the 1920s, and by 1930 there were 5,968 people living there. Oil activity declined during the early 1930s after the East Texas oilfield opened in 1931-32 and the Great Depression drove oil prices down" - Handbook of Texas online. No copies of this map in OCLC.