Burkburnett, Texas: The Boomtown Oil Town

Samuel Burk Burnett was a Texas cattle king who bought his first hundred head at age nineteen and built the Four Sixes Ranch into a Wichita County empire. In nineteen oh-six he sold nearly seventeen thousand acres to developers who extended a railroad north from Wichita Falls. President Theodore Roosevelt, who had hunted coyotes and wolves with Burnett on a famous nineteen oh five visit, helped persuade postal authorities to name the new town Burkburnett, combining the rancher's two names.

For a decade the town was quiet and small. Then, on July twenty-ninth, nineteen eighteen, an oil well drilled on the Burnett ranch hit a massive field at seventeen hundred thirty-four feet. Within weeks the population exploded from seven hundred to eight thousand.

By June of nineteen nineteen there were more than eight hundred fifty producing wells here. Twenty trains ran daily to nearby Wichita Falls. The nineteen forty film Boomtown, starring Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, told this town's story to moviegoers across America.