Kilgore National Bank: Art Moderne in the Oil Patch

When oil was discovered in the East Texas field in nineteen thirty, Kilgore transformed overnight from a small farming town into a boomtown, with derricks rising thick across town. By nineteen thirty-seven, in the middle of the Great Depression, the Kilgore National Bank board decided that prosperity justified a new building, and they hired Henderson architect James L. Downing to design it.

Downing drew on the Art Moderne style then fashionable for banks and civic buildings across America, a streamlined aesthetic of smooth surfaces, horizontal lines, and restrained ornament that signaled modernity and stability. Building a landmark bank during the Depression was a deliberate statement of confidence in Kilgore's oil-fueled economy. The building still stands as a monument to the brief, improbable prosperity that crude oil poured onto the East Texas Piney Woods.