Pattillo Higgins

Salt-dome oil fields dot the East Texas Gulf coast. From Humble to Sour Lake, Batson to Goose Creek, derricks, pump jacks, and pipelines became symbols of industrialization and economic growth. But without the vision of Patillo Higgins such developments may never have occurred.

Patillo Higgins was born in Sabine Pass on December 5, 1863, to Robert James and Sarah Higgins. Moving to Beaumont as a child, he left school after the fourth grade and worked with his father, a gunsmith. Young Higgins was often in trouble as a teen. At age seventeen he was implicated in the death of a sheriff's deputy, tried for murder, but acquitted after claiming self-defense. A gunshot wound suffered during the altercation, however, led to his arm being amputated.

Despite his disability, Higgins found work in numerous logging camps in East Texas and Louisiana between 1880 and 1885. By all accounts, he continued his violent, tumultuous existence. Then a chance encounter with a Baptist preacher changed his life. Higgins found religion, renounced his prior lifestyle, and moved back to Beaumont as a respectable real estate broker and Sunday school teacher.

In 1886 Higgins founded a manufacturing company to make bricks. This venture led him to Spindletop Hill south of Beaumont, a salt-dome formation where oil seeps were common. In 1892 he recruited investors and organized the Gladys City Oil, Gas, and Manufacturing Company, and the following year began drilling at Spindletop.

Higgins and his partners soon quarreled over the direction of the company, and in 1895 he left Gladys City Oil. By this time three separate exploratory wells had failed to find oil at Spindletop. Industry experts unanimously denounced the effort as a waste of time, and Beaumont residents had taken to treating Patillo Higgins as a foolish eccentric.

But Higgins persevered. He advertised for investors, engineers, and geologists interested in exploring the salt dome formation. He convinced Anthony "Cap" Lucas, an expert in the field, to join his quest. Lucas in turn recruited Pennsylvania oilmen J. M. Guffey and J. H. Galey, as well as multi-millionaire Pittsburgh financier Andrew Mellon. Then, ironically, the new partners forced Higgins out just before bringing in the well that proved him correct on January 10, 1901.

Higgins sued his former partners, settled out of court, and proceeded to form exploration companies and open fields throughout East Texas. He remained a bachelor until the age of forty-five, marrying eighteen-year-old Annie Johns in 1908, a union that solidified his reputation as eccentric, since he had adopted the young woman three years before. But his belief in riches under Spindletop Hill had proven prescient, and Patillo Higgins, however eccentric, had helped bring revolutionary change to Texas and the world.

Patillo Higgins died in San Antonio in June 1955 and was interred at Mission Burial Park South in that city. To get there, exit South Loop 410 to Roosevelt Ave., go north to Military Drive, then east 3/4 of a mile. The cemetery is on the south side of the street, at 1700 SE Military Dr.

For more information about Patillo Higgins, see Robert W. McDaniel and Henry C. Dethloff, Patillo Higgins and the Search for Texas Oil (1989), or The Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum at http://www.spindletop.org. To learn more about East Texas history, contact the East Texas Historical Association at Stephen F. Austin State University or visit the ETHA web site at http://leonardo.sfasu.edu/etha/.