Electra: Cattle Town to Oil Boom

Electra began as a shipping point on the cattleman W. T. Waggoner's enormous ranch in Wichita County and was renamed in nineteen oh two for Waggoner's daughter, Electra Waggoner.

The town incorporated in nineteen oh seven with five hundred residents, a quiet ranch supply stop on the Texas plains. That quiet ended on April first, nineteen eleven, when the Clayco Number One well came in a gusher a mile north of town. Within months the population had swelled to five thousand.

Because the oil leases were already in place and the town was already platted, Electra avoided the worst tent-city chaos of other boomtowns. The oilfield produced roughly ten million barrels over the next fifteen years. The Waggoner Ranch around it grew into one of the largest contiguous ranches in the United States, spanning parts of six counties and eventually five hundred and thirty-five thousand acres.