Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

Penwell – Ghost oil town
November 19, 2003

In 1939, a little 8 year old girl riding on "The Black Gold," the Texas and Pacific Railroad's passenger train from Dallas to the oil fields of west Texas, loudly asked while passing Big Spring, "Who done it?" The adults in the packed train roared with laughter -- she had just smelled the scent of the source of the boomtown money that lured the people that filled the train. In 2003, her big brother, a member of Penwell's Boy Scout Troop 55, (1939-1942) told the story as we sifted the sand among the crumbling foundations of their house in the ghost camp of the Ec-Tex Phillips refinery. A dozen such camps were once within 20 miles. The ruins of the refinery (it only ran those three same years) could be seen through the mesquite bushes to our south.

The only remnant of the landscaping of the camp, old logs of long-dead Siberian Elms, gave us a place to rest when our knees started aching from kneeling down to pick up artifacts of his childhood. "Yep, this is the marble that the superintendent's kid won from me!" Catching the big grin on my companion's face, I cackled, knowing that hyperbole made the story. We looked down the street now full of scrub mesquite, delineated by the sidewalks along the two rows of foundations. "That is where the superintendent lived, " he said, pointing across to the other side. "It was a bigger house -- with maybe a thousand square-foot floor space."

"Out beyond his house were barns and a big vegetable garden -- most of the people of the camp had been raised on farms, so many of them kept a horse, a cow, a pig, or some chickens. Our house was only 800 square feet for our family of five. We had natural gas, electricity, and running water all supplied by the refinery. Out back of the houses were incinerators built of brick and metal -- the gas flame burned all the time, and we would stand on top of it waiting for the school bus on cold dark winter mornings."

He showed me a slab of asbestos siding from the camp houses. "This was high-tech in those days. We really were uptown folks -- there were quite a few people living in tents between here and the Bankhead Highway. There was six lumberyards, a doctor's office, a drug store, two hotels, several clothing stores, a row of bars, a dance hall, a pool hall, a post office, a newspaper, several garages and gas stations, and three churches."

Later in the day, up at the new cemetery (begun in 1994 by today's only remaining family - the Rhodes) we ran into another person that had lived in Penwell at the same time. Rachel Miller Anderson, now of Hobbs, had ridden the same school bus to Odessa as my friend. "We came out here from Merkel, after cotton pulling time and lived on the Farley place south of town, then in a tent, then in a shack along 'Bar Row,' before finally buying an old tin building for 300 dollars." Mrs. Anderson had just put one of her sons on the plane at Midland, and asked her other son to drive her around Penwell before heading home. She had just buried her husband the day before, and she was finding succor in exploring the scenes of her childhood.

"After I graduated high school, I only lived here for a few months. My parents lived here through the 1950s. I hated Penwell -- I wanted to explore the world. Lowell Rhodes used to try to get me to go out with him back then. We just now stopped and talked to him at the welding shop along the Interstate. They sure have done a nice job on this cemetery, haven't they -- planting all the purple sage and moving in all the big pretty rocks. I wonder if Lowell made the angels on the gate?"

Terry Anderson, her son, chimed in. "I hiked all the hills of the caprock in the 1950's when I came to visit my grandparents. I loved to stand next to the railroad and feel the power and weight of the trains shake my body -- it scared me, but I loved it, and came running to the tracks every time a train came through." My guide of the day took up the thread of the narrative of the conversation, "I used to help the postmaster in New Penwell. Before the train came we would hang up the mail sack on the arm where the mail car clerk could hook it as the train went by at top speed. We would have to duck the flying incoming mail sack that he tossed out at the same time."

Remembering what Terry had said, he continued, "We hiked all over the place, too. See the point of the cap down there? That's the 4 windmills. We hiked 7 miles to go skinny-dipping in the big cement stocktank there, carrying water in Mason jars. I don't know why we rarely came north of the railroad, but we also went two miles west of town, out towards Badger. Out there, on the C-bar ranch, was a big steel stock tank we would swim in, and we would moon the cars and trucks as they went by on the Bankhead." To get to the cemetery, we had crossed the ruins of the old highway, its black centerline still visible.

Back down at the Phillips camp, my (don't mention my name) friend had talked about the sense of freedom and community that he and his siblings enjoyed growing up in Penwell. "The adults took a great deal of interest in us. Jesse Miles, who lived in the bunkhouse for unmarried men, was the scoutmaster. We had a scout hut up on the caprock and spent many nights up there, sleeping in old army pup tents. On weekends we would go down to Toyah Creek south of Pecos and catch big catfish. Once a year the refinery would have a company picnic in the sandhills. We would carry baskets and blankets deep into the sanddunes and spend the day playing."

"Our folks trusted us. They let us climb the standard oil derricks that stood over every pumpjack -- we liked to take our clothes off and watch them float to the ground! We abused that trust sometimes -- we found out the nails on the 4 car garages between each 4 houses had lead heads, so we took that lead and sold it in town for 2 cents a pound. We found some electric cable that we stripped the copper out of and sold for 6 cents a pound. We would go to the tennis courts on the north side of the camp -- it had a caliche surface, and pick up all the cigarette butts and empty out the tobacco, then roll new cigarettes and then go sit in a big empty water tank and smoke."

As my companion talked, I watched a pickup and horsetrailer go by. The trailer had three saddled horses in it -- for the 120th consecutive year the fall works were keeping cowboys busy. The tank battery near us reeked of sour-gas. At my feet harvester ants were sorting grass seeds. Dozens of little black beetles were "lekking" on the cleared area of every ant nest -- the plentiful males chasing each female as she arrived. He reached down and picked up part of a toy knife made of metal, shaking an ant off. With a catch in his voice, he said, "This was in my sister's toy kitchen set."