Texas Oil Boom

654 Words2 Pages

Without bias, any United States citizen has thought of Texas of being a big oil producer in the country. Afterall, since the largest discovery of oil in the United States in 1901 was discovered near Beaumont, Texas it would cause some changes not only in the local area but the entire state as well. We all take oil for granted each day but maybe one day you should thank Texas for fueling the United State’s oil production and making the economy a lot better.
In the late 19th century the University of Texas will given 1,000,000 acres of land in West Texas as an endowment from the Texas Legislature. About 30 years later, the university started drilling for oil and their awakening came in 1923 with the discovery of oil on their property. Since then they have made up to $4.4 billion dollars (1923-2008). This did not just affect the universities wealth, it effected another university as well which was split in a ⅓ payment to Texas A&M. The only money produced in West Texas was enough for the universities to give more grants and …show more content…

Even though this might seem bad, it really wasn’t. When people left their domestic jobs (ex. Cleaning up the house, washing dishes, etc.) they went into the oil field, in turn these ‘minorities’ took these open domestic jobs and used them to get wealthier. An excellent object comes from Willse Lee Mckinney who said; “The thing that caused me to stop here in 1949, … I could make one dollar per hour for domestic work: cleaning house, washing, and ironing. So if I worked ten hours that day. I had ten dollars. Ten dollars per week was a good wage back in East Texas. So I thought, “Well this is it. I’ll stay here and make me a little money and go back to school…” This could mean that now minorities would start to rise up from what they would be thought of as a sort of scapegoat in the 19th

Open Document