Luling: The Wildcatter Who Gave It All Away

Luling, Texas has had three lives. It was born as a railroad town, survived as a cotton town, and was reborn as an oil town, all within a span of fifty years. The oil chapter produced one of the most genuinely unusual stories in the history of American business.

The town was platted in eighteen seventy-four when the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railway laid tracks through Caldwell County. For its first decade, Luling was a cattle shipping point so rough it earned the nickname the toughest town in Texas. When the cattle drives ended, the town quieted to a village of about five hundred people living on cotton farming.

Then Edgar Byram Davis arrived. A Massachusetts shoe salesman turned rubber plantation investor turned wildcatter, Davis had no geological training and no obvious reason to believe there was oil under Luling. He drilled six dry holes and mortgaged everything he owned. On August ninth, nineteen twenty-two, his seventh well, the Rafael Rios Number One, struck oil. Within a decade, the Luling oilfield was producing steadily, and the town's population had jumped from fifteen hundred to nearly six thousand.

In nineteen twenty-six, Davis sold his oil leases to Magnolia Petroleum for twelve million dollars, half in cash. What he did next made him a legend. He divided nearly two million dollars among his employees as profit-sharing bonuses. He funded an experimental model farm outside of town. He threw a free barbecue for the entire region, feeding thousands of people to celebrate his good fortune. He eventually gave away most of what he made.

Luling holds a Watermelon Thump festival every June, complete with a seed-spitting contest. Pumpjacks still nod in fields near the town square. And the story of Edgar Davis, the wildcatter who struck it rich and tried to share it, still gets told.