Artesia: Named for Water, Powered by Oil

Artesia's name comes from the underground water that made the lower Pecos Valley farmable. Starting in the eighteen eighties, homesteaders drilled artesian wells into the pressurized aquifer beneath the desert floor and found water that flowed to the surface without pumping. The town that grew up around those wells was incorporated in nineteen oh five and named for the artesian system that had made it possible.

By the nineteen twenties, overuse had dropped the water table and the free-flowing wells mostly stopped. But in April nineteen twenty-four, a different substance came up out of the same ground: oil. The Illinois Number Three well struck petroleum and launched the Artesia oil boom.

Since then, eight point eight billion barrels of oil have been produced in southeastern New Mexico, and Artesia remains the center of that industry. The city is home to one of the few inland oil refineries in the United States, operated today by H F Sinclair.