Corsicana: Texas's First Oil Strike and the World's Most Mailed Fruitcake

In the summer of eighteen ninety-four, the city council of Corsicana hired a drilling crew to solve a mundane problem: the growing town needed more water. The contractor they brought in from Kansas, the American Well and Prospecting Company, pushed a drill down one thousand and thirty-five feet and on June ninth struck something that nobody in Texas had seen in quantity before. It was not water. The city council, furious, paid only half the drilling fee.

What the bit had hit was oil, and Corsicana was sitting on top of the first commercially significant petroleum field in Texas. Within four years there were nearly three hundred producing wells. In eighteen ninety-eight the J. S. Cullinan Company opened the first modern refinery in the state. Corsicana also became the proving ground for a new drilling technology. When the field's operators secured rights to a hydraulic rotary rig design in nineteen hundred, they introduced a method far more efficient than the old cable-tool systems, one that would eventually be used across every major oil patch in the world.

The oil boom that followed transformed Corsicana from a cotton-shipping town into an industrial center. It would also send ripples northward, financially linking the Corsicana fields to the investors and wildcatters who would later drill at Spindletop in Beaumont, where the real Texas oil age exploded in nineteen oh one.

Corsicana has a second claim on American attention that operates at a different register entirely. In eighteen ninety-six a young German immigrant named August Weidmann opened a bakery on Collin Street, backed by a local cotton buyer named Tom McElwee. Weidmann brought a fruitcake recipe from the old country. The business struggled until the day John Ringling and the Ringling Brothers circus came to town, tasted the fruitcake, and ordered crates shipped to circus friends around the world. The mail-order business that followed became Collin Street Bakery, which today bakes thirty thousand fruitcakes a day during the holiday season and ships them to all fifty states and more than one hundred and ninety countries.