Mexia, Boom Town on the Balcones Fault

Mexia, Texas, pronounced muh-HAY-uh by locals, was a quiet railroad town of four thousand people when oil was discovered beneath Limestone County in November nineteen twenty. Within a year, the population had swelled to nearly thirty-five thousand. Mexia in nineteen twenty-one was pure boom: derricks going up overnight, speculators arriving by every train, hotels charging any price they could get, and every vice that follows sudden money descending on a town that had no infrastructure to handle any of it.

Martial law was declared in parts of the county in nineteen twenty-two to address gambling, bootlegging, and violence. By the mid-nineteen twenties the population had settled back toward ten thousand as the flush production faded. Mexia diversified, built schools and civic institutions with oil money, and survived.

One of the oil boom's lasting marks: the Mexia field was an early proving ground for the discovery that faults, in this case the Balcones Fault Zone, could trap oil in ways that geologists were only beginning to understand.