Black Diamonds! Black Gold!: The Saga of Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company

by Don Woodard

Book Overview

Texas, they say, is so rich you can pull money right out of the ground. It must be true, because in a West Texas town called Thurber, the Texas Pacific Coal & Oil Company. grew rich digging coal, drilling oil, and making bricks from the clay soil. The Texas Pacific Co., or TP, as it was known at the beginning, was born in 1888 just seventy-five miles west of Fort Worth and took its name from its only customer, Texas Pacific Railroad. Employing mostly immigrant workers in the coal mines, the company prospered, creating a town--eventually called Thurber--and adding a brick works in 1894. For several years Thurber rivaled Fort Worth as the largest population and cultural center of the region. The discovery of the famous Ranger oil field in 1917 by a TP employee began not only a whole new chapter in the development and expansion of the company, but also in the growth of Texas.Through photographs, newspaper articles, company archives, and oral recollections, Woodard gives the reader a glimpse of the life and times of the people and events that shaped the socioeconomic growth of the region. The latter part of the book offers a tantalizing glimpse of the post-World War II development of Fort Worth, including the political maneuverings of the last chairman of the company, H. B. Fuqua. Oil money, cattle barons, politicos--the history of Texas Pacific Coal and Oil is a story not only about a company, but also of the people whose dreams and actions moved a fortune from the dusty ground of the prairie into the new bustling frontier economy that created twentieth-century Texas.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0896723798
• ISBN13: 9780896723795
• Release Date: June 1997
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 1.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A memorable story

I read this book a few years ago and loved it. The story of the Texas and Pacific Coal and Oil company seems so typically American. From the crooked Yankee come South who recognizes the coal that was a nuisance to the farmer scratching out a living, the New York financiers who put the enterprise on a secure financial foundation and did very well by themselves in the process, the immigrant miners, prosperous company town, self-taught geololgist who opened up the Ranger oil field, a gas-pump juckey who earned a raise in the midst of the depression selling lube jobs and treating his wife to a mid-week hamburger, the names which dot Fort Worth buildings and streets, this book covers and links up an America and Texas from frontier to the outlines of its present corporate complexity.