Gladys City: The Dream Before the Gusher

Before there was an oil field at Spindletop, there was a plan for a city.

Patillo Higgins had grown up near Beaumont, lost his lower left arm after a shooting incident as a teenager, found religion, and become a Sunday school teacher who spent his spare time reading geology papers. In the early eighteen nineties he became convinced that the low mound south of town, locals called it Sour Spring Mound for the gas that occasionally bubbled up, sat atop a massive pocket of oil, gas, and brimstone. He also had a vision of what should be built above it: a model industrial city he would name Gladys City, after a girl in his Sunday school class.

Higgins formed the Gladys City Oil, Gas and Manufacturing Company in eighteen ninety-two with three other investors. He wrote promotional literature describing the planned city's factories, churches, and worker housing. He hired drilling contractors. They drilled. They found nothing.

He drilled again. Nothing. And again. The partners drifted away. Higgins was mocked by the local business community. He persisted through three dry holes over eight years, eventually leasing land at Spindletop to Anthony Lucas in eighteen ninety-nine when his own funds were exhausted.

By the time Lucas brought in the great gusher on January tenth, nineteen oh one, Patillo Higgins had sold his shares in the company and been cut out of the Lucas deal. He watched others make fortunes on the field he had predicted and fought for alone for nearly a decade. He later filed lawsuits to recover a larger share. The suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

The Gladys City he imagined was never built as a planned community. What arose instead was a chaotic oil-derrick boomtown, derricks stacked so close together their legs overlapped. The Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum now stands near the original site, reconstructing the wooden derricks and tin-roofed buildings of that world. Higgins's prophecy was exactly right. What he got for it is a complicated story.