Glenn Pool and the Birth of Oil Capital
Near Tulsa, Oklahoma
On November twenty-second, nineteen oh five, a woman named Ida Glenn and a driller named Robert Galbreath brought in a well about fifteen miles south of downtown Tulsa on a Creek allotment. The well came in at around eighty barrels a day, and production from the field grew explosively from there. Within eighteen months, Glenn Pool was the most productive oil field on the planet.
The timing was extraordinary. The world had just begun to need oil at a scale no one had anticipated. The automobile was new. The idea that petroleum would replace coal as the energy currency of industrial civilization was just becoming thinkable. Glenn Pool made it more than thinkable. It made Tulsa rich.
The wealth did not arrive slowly. By nineteen oh seven, the year Oklahoma achieved statehood, Tulsa had more millionaires per capita than any city in the nation. Oil men with names like Waite Phillips, Josh Crank, and Harry Sinclair built mansions on the ridge above the Arkansas River and financed everything from hospitals to art museums. The city called itself the Oil Capital of the World, a title it printed on stationery, posted on signs, and, for a time, very nearly made true.
The architecture that resulted from that boom has no equivalent in the American Southwest. In the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, when Tulsa was still flush and the Art Deco movement was cresting, the city's oil barons built in a style that combined industrial confidence with decorative extravagance. The Philtower, finished in nineteen twenty-seven. The Philcade, next to it. The Boston Avenue Methodist Church, completed in nineteen twenty-nine and now considered one of the finest examples of Art Deco architecture in the United States. The Union Depot. The Mayo Hotel. The Mid-Continent Building. Twenty-seven Art Deco structures survive downtown, one of the largest concentrations in any American city.
What funded all of it, directly or indirectly, was Glenn Pool. Ida Glenn had leased her allotted Creek land to Galbreath in exchange for one-eighth of everything that came out of it. She reportedly received just over two hundred fifty thousand dollars over the life of the lease, a sum that sounds vast until you calculate what the oil men made.
