Texas, they say, is so rich you can pull money right out of the ground. It must be true, because in a West Texas town called Thurber, the Texas Pacific Coal & Oil Company. grew rich digging coal, drilling oil, and making bricks from the clay soil. The Texas Pacific Co., or TP, as it was known at the beginning, was born in 1888 just seventy-five miles west of Fort Worth and took its name from its only customer, Texas Pacific Railroad. Employing mostly immigrant workers in the coal mines, the company prospered, creating a town—eventually called Thurber—and adding a brick works in 1894. For several years Thurber rivaled Fort Worth as the largest population and cultural center of the region. The discovery of the famous Ranger oil field in 1917 by a TP employee began not only a whole new chapter in the development and expansion of the company, but also in the growth of Texas. Through photographs, newspaper articles, company archives, and oral recollections, Woodard gives the reader a glimpse of the life and times of the people and events that shaped the socioeconomic growth of the region. The latter part of the book offers a tantalizing glimpse of the post–World War II development of Fort Worth, including the political maneuverings of the last chairman of the company, H. B. Fuqua. Oil money, cattle barons, politicos—the history of Texas Pacific Coal and Oil is a story not only about a company, but also of the people whose dreams and actions moved a fortune from the dusty ground of the prairie into the new bustling frontier economy that created twentieth-century Texas.
List Price: $ 29.95
Price: $ 29.95
A memorable story,
I read this book a few years ago and loved it. The story of the Texas and Pacific Coal and Oil company seems so typically American. From the crooked Yankee come South who recognizes the coal that was a nuisance to the farmer scratching out a living, the New York financiers who put the enterprise on a secure financial foundation and did very well by themselves in the process, the immigrant miners, prosperous company town, self-taught geololgist who opened up the Ranger oil field, a gas-pump juckey who earned a raise in the midst of the depression selling lube jobs and treating his wife to a mid-week hamburger, the names which dot Fort Worth buildings and streets, this book covers and links up an America and Texas from frontier to the outlines of its present corporate complexity.
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|Found Granfather,
Was researching family history and amazingly stumbled across a story in this well written book of my Great Great Scottish Immigrant Grandfather recieving a Gold medal for saving 50 miners from a coal mine fire in Thurber,Texas in 1897. The Part about the crowd at the mine falling silent in awe, when my grandfather stepped forward to volunteer for what was considered a suicide mission, was inspiring to me.(pages 56-58)I found this thru your “look inside book” application, but plan on buying several copies of this well researched book for family members.
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|Fuqua Brothers Make Good: My family stories need to be histories: Grt Uncle Nolen Jones Fuqua & Babe H.B. Fuqua.,
I have no personal family historical material: I have found out many of my ancestors are historical figures, which is a lucky thing.
Searching Great Aunt Ruth Jones Fuqua who married Nolen Jones Fuqua, I found this book about him and his brother H.B. “Babe” Fuqua. This book gives the whole shell of a story explaining the Census data for Nolen as “Sales Mgt for Oil Company”.
I met my Great Uncle Nolen at a Family wedding once, but never met H.B. Fuqua…
Fascinating tale of oil and coal booms and how sometimes the CEO’s had principles.
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