How did a profligate who killed a deputy sheriff before reforming, a mining engineer who went AWOL from the Austrian navy, and three East Texas drillers join forces with other equally colorful characters to drill on Spindletop Hill? The answers are all here—the challenge and frustration of the search, the excitement of the discovery, the euphoric chaos of the boom, and the genesis of the giant companies. In this scholarly work firmly rooted in the narrative tradition, and using material collected over decades, the authors bring to life the efforts of Pattillo Higgins, Anthony Lucas, Al and Curt Hamill, and Peck Byrd to master the Spindletop salt dome—efforts that culminated in the discovery of the great Lucas Gusher. Their find subsequently transformed not only the state of Texas but the entire oil industry.

Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, Texas, in 1901

Business & Money

Rienstra, Ellen Walker

Stiles, Jo

Linsley, Judith Walker

Biography & History

Texas State Historical Assn

“They have a staying quality, these Hookses, that I can only describe as haunting. They have inhabited my imagination all my life, inexplicable ghosts, to be exorcised only by that bit of magic that created them in the first place, the turn of a phrase.” Thus Callie Coe Wilson introduces us to her family of inveterate tale tellers, the expansive and eccentric Hooks clan of Hardin County, Texas. Wilson and her cousin Ellen Walker Rienstra capture in this unusual family saga the essence of why families take such delight in the stories of their ancestors. We see William “Pap” Hooks, legendary progenitor of the numerous clans, plowing his fields in his shirttail because “he disliked the constrictions of conventional dress and …refused to be encumbered by custom.” We hunt black bear in the Big Thicket with Ben and Bud, confronting the enraged bear that once grabbed the end of Bud’s gun in its teeth. We marvel at Ben’s fiddle rendition of “Cattle in the Canebrake,” recorded with a cactus needle. Ben, the shrewdest of Pap’s many sons, is said to have made three separate fortunes: one in whiskey, one in lumber, and one in oil. In 1904 he brought in the Saratoga oil field in East Texas with just small hand pumps, a hand-bolted derrick, and a passel of friends and brothers. There are also fleet-footed Gus, “unconventional to the point of being perverse”; khaki-clad Arden, the family’s principal raconteur; and Bryant Coe, who declined an invitation to a family dinner party because he “could not find his other sock.” In a unique blend of two voices, Wilson and Rienstra sing the ballads of their forebears, who not only settled Harding County but largely populated it. Each from her own perspective, but with both perspectives formed by the same family traditions, the cousins memorialize the exploits of the celebrated Hookses. Their stories are true---with the truth that is “the patina that forms in time on fact.” They illustrate and celebrate the passage of time, the permanence of memory, and the melding of separate lives into an acceptable family tradition.

A Pride of Kin (Wardlaw Books)

Biographies & Memoirs

Wilson, Callie Coe

Community & Culture

Texas A&M University Press

This family history tells the story of three generations of illustrious Texans whose progenitor, a Pennsylvania butcher-turned-lumberman named Henry Jacob Lutcher, came to East Texas in 1877 in search of new timber sources. In Orange, Texas, he established the Lutcher &amp; Moore Lumber Company, at one time the largest lumber company in the nation, and made a substantial fortune. His spouse, Frances Ann, became a noted philanthropist, building a church and a hospital in Orange.
Their older daughter, Miriam, married the capitalist William Henry Stark, who expanded and diversified the family enterprises. Miriam became a noted rare book collector, eventually donating her collection to the University of Texas. The Starks’ son, H. J. Lutcher Stark, was a major philanthropist who benefited countless charities in his home region and at the University of Texas, serving for almost twenty-four years on its Board of Regents. With his wife, he created the Nelda C. and H. J. Lutcher Stark Foundation, where the legacy of the Lutcher and Stark families lives on.
This history places the families within the context of their times, divesting them of myth and presenting them factually as the exceptional people they were. It represents the first in-depth treatment of the wealth of primary material in the Stark Foundation’s archives, never before publicly available. It presents a part of Texas that is distinct in culture, history, and terrain while offering an intriguing saga of the lives and vicissitudes of this extraordinary family.

The Long Shadow: The Lutcher-Stark Lumber Dynasty

Stiles, Jo Ann

Historical

H. J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports

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