The First Derricks on the Water: Caddo Lake's Oil Boom

In nineteen eleven, a crew working for Gulf Refining Company set up the world's first over-water oil platform on Caddo Lake, roughly twenty miles northwest of Shreveport. They called the well Ferry Lake Number One. It struck oil.

No one had drilled from a platform floating on open water before. Gulf Refining had pioneered drilling over water, in a Louisiana swamp. Within a few years, derricks stood throughout the lake.

They rose from the cypress-shadowed water at angles that would have seemed impossible to anyone who had not seen them built, connected by a web of wooden walkways and pipe. Caddo Lake had already been an extraordinary place, its water so thick with bald cypress that the timber industry had moved through it for decades before the oilmen arrived. Now it became an industrial field as well.

The boom did not last in the way the promoters imagined. The richest production eventually shifted westward to the East Texas fields, particularly around Kilgore. The derricks at Caddo Lake came down, or rusted and fell.

The ecosystem had been significantly damaged by the drilling, and by the time recovery efforts began, the lake looked nothing like the place the Caddo had fished for centuries. Shreveport's own economy benefited enormously from the regional oil industry even after the lake fields played out. Standard Oil of Louisiana maintained headquarters in the city for decades, and United Gas Corporation, the nation's busiest pipeline operator in its era, was headquartered in Shreveport from nineteen thirty until a merger in nineteen sixty-eight.