Santa Rita Number One: The Well That Built a University

In the spring of nineteen twenty-three, a group of oil prospectors hired a crew to drill on land the state of Texas had set aside for the benefit of its public universities. The land was West Texas scrubland, dry and seemingly worthless. Before drilling began, a crew member scattered rose petals down the hole and named it after the patron saint of impossible causes. Santa Rita Number One.

The geology behind the well had been theorized by a University of Texas professor named J.A. Udden, who speculated in nineteen seventeen that the geological structures associated with the Marathon Mountains might extend northward into the desert flats. Other geologists developed the theory further. Drilling on the University Lands began at the Big Lake field in Reagan County in nineteen twenty-one and nineteen twenty-two. On May twenty-eighth, nineteen twenty-three, the Santa Rita well came in.

What flowed out of the ground that spring day was not just petroleum. It was the financial foundation of the University of Texas and Texas A&M. The land it sat on was part of a parcel of more than two million acres that the Texas Constitution of eighteen seventy-six had granted to the Permanent University Fund, a financial endowment to support higher education in the state. The land had been considered nearly valueless for decades. University officials had occasionally proposed trading it for something more useful. No trade was made.

By the nineteen thirties and forties, oil royalties from the Permian Basin lands were flowing into the Permanent University Fund in quantities that transformed Texas higher education. The University of Texas at Austin grew from a regional institution into a research university of national standing, funded in substantial part by the ancient sea floor beneath West Texas. The Santa Rita rig was eventually moved to the Austin campus, where it still stands near the football stadium as a monument to the impossible cause that came in.