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Pattillo Higgins, called by
some the "prophet of Spindletop," was born on December 5, 1863,
in Sabine Pass, Texas, the son of Robert James and Sarah (Raye)
Higgins. By the time he was six, his family had moved to
Beaumont, where he attended school until he reached the fourth
grade. Thereafter he left school and apprenticed with his
father, a gunsmith. As a teenager, Higgins was a troublemaker
and a practical joker. At age seventeen he was involved in an
altercation with some sheriff's deputies who were attempting to
prevent him from harassing blacks. After the smoke cleared, a
deputy was dead, and Higgins had suffered a wound in his arm
that eventually led to its amputation. In the investigation and
trial that followed, Higgins claimed he shot in self-defense and
the jury believed him. After the incident he went to work in
various lumber camps along the Texas-Louisiana border. The loss
of his arm did not prevent him from logging nor did it seem to
curb his wild ways. In 1885, however, his life took a dramatic
turn after he attended a Baptist revival meeting. Persuaded by
the preacher to accept Christ as his savior, Higgins abandoned
his violent ways and the sometimes immoral atmosphere of the
lumber camps to settle down in Beaumont and become a respectable
businessman. As he explained, "I used to put my trust in
pistols....now my trust is in God." Higgins's conversion was so
complete that he began to teach Sunday School classes for young
ladies at his home church. He had saved and invested his extra
cash while working in the lumber camps, and upon his return to
Beaumont he established himself as a real estate broker. In 1886
he expanded his business by forming the Higgins Manufacturing
Company to make brick.
Through the brick business,
Higgins became interested in brick and glass factories that were
powered by the even-burning fuels of oil and gas. After a trip
East to inspect modern plants, he began to plan an industrial
city on Spindletop Hill, a salt-dome formation south of
Beaumont. He chose the site because he believed that oil and gas
could be found beneath the salt dome, despite the conventional
wisdom of the day that the Gulf Coast region did not have any
petroleum potential. Higgins, with the financial backing of
George W. Carroll,qv
whom he knew through his religious activities, purchased about
half of Spindletop Hill. Subsequently Carroll and Higgins formed
a partnership with George Washington O'Brien,qv
who held the rights to the other half of Spindletop. O'Brien had
been convinced of Spindletop's oil potential since 1865, when he
saw oil oozing from the ground there. Higgins convinced his
fellow investors to name the company after one of his Sunday
School students, Gladys Bingham, of whom he was quite fond. In
August 1892 the men incorporated the Gladys City Oil, Gas and
Manufacturing Company with the purpose of finding the oil and
then building a city around it. Higgins was appointed treasurer
and general manager. The company drilled unsuccessfully in 1893;
it leased some of the land to the Savage Brothers of Corsicana
for an unsuccessful attempt in 1895. That year Higgins resigned
from the company after a dispute he had with the board of
directors over extending a second lease to the Savages. Higgins
disliked the terms of the contract with the wildcatters. After
his resignation, a third unsuccessful well was sunk.
By 1896, industry
experts and Beaumont residents believed that Spindletop was
worthless and that Higgins was something of a fool. Even Gladys
City directors doubted that they would ever be able to recoup
their investment. At one point they even offered to sell the
company to Higgins, but he couldn't raise the necessary cash
because of his heavy real estate investments. Still believing,
despite public opinion, in Spindletop's potential, Higgins
placed ads in magazines, newspapers, and industry journals
throughout the nation in search of geologists and engineers
interested in developing the tract. Anthony Francis Lucas,qv
a leading expert on salt-dome formations, responded to one of
the advertisements and traveled to Beaumont. With the assistance
of Higgins, Lucas negotiated a lease on June 20, 1899, with
Gladys City to drill on Spindletop. In a separate agreement,
Lucas gave Higgins a 10 percent interest in his lease as payment
for Higgins's assistance in the deal. Lucas drilled to a depth
of 575 feet before running into difficulties and out of money.
As with the other wells, drilling was complicated by the
quicksand in the formation that made it difficult to get to any
great depth. Still believing in the soundness of the project,
Lucas returned to the East to get new financing. Eventually he
entered into an agreement with Guffey and Galey of Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, who had successfully developed the Corsicana
oilfield.qv
Guffey and Galey in turn brought in the
considerable resources of Andrew Mellon, who agreed to provide
funds for five exploratory wells. One of the conditions of the
agreement between Lucas and his new financial backers was that
Pattillo Higgins was to have no interest in the venture.
In September 1900 Lucas
signed a new twenty-year lease with Gladys City and also leased
adjoining tracts from the McFadden-Wiess and Kyle farms. It was
on the adjoining land that the Lucas Gusher (see
SPINDLETOP OILFIELD) came in on January 10, 1901. An estimated
oil production of 100,000 barrels a day flowed uncapped from
this well for nine days. Higgins sued Lucas and Gladys City Oil,
Gas and Manufacturing Company for royalties after the gusher,
arguing that Lucas's second lease was invalid since it was
executed before the expiration of the first lease. Higgins and
his former friends settled out of court for an undisclosed
amount. Shut out of Gladys City and the Lucas Gusher, Higgins
rebounded and formed Higgins Oil and Fuel Company, based on a
thirty-three-acre lease he controlled in the center of
Spindletop. Wells developed on this site proved over time to be
twice as productive as the original gusher. The success of this
second company, plus Higgins's tendency to overextend himself in
land speculation, made Higgins Oil and Fuel vulnerable to a
takeover bid in 1902 by John Henry Kirby.qv
Accepting defeat gracefully, Higgins sold his shares to Kirby
for $3 million, but he shrewdly retained his leasing rights on
his original acreage.
Higgins's next venture was to
form the Higgins Standard Oil Company, which became the vehicle
for subsequent explorations of Texas Gulf Coast salt-dome
fields. Over the next fifty years, Higgins continued to be
something of a maverick in the oil and gas industry.qv
Typically he would open a field but then pull out before giving
it a chance to prosper, leaving the great profits to his
followers. One day he would be a millionaire and the next he
would be fighting with investors for more money to continue
drilling a dry well. In addition to being a self-taught
geologist, Higgins was also a draftsman, cartographer, inventor,
naturalist, industrial designer, artist, and engineer.
In both his business dealings
and his personal relationships, Higgins could be quite dogmatic
and unyielding. Through his reading and analyzing of the Bible,
he developed a profound belief in moral perfection on earth, and
he was quite critical of preachers and others who argued that
humans were imperfect and bound to sin. His views led him to
criticize any public form of entertainment, such as swimming or
dancing. He also hated theaters, beach resorts, and the selling
of alcohol. A bachelor until age forty-five, Higgins owned homes
in Beaumont, Houston, and San Antonio. He was always generous
with his family members, and his mother lived with him until her
death in 1907. He was also in the habit of adopting orphaned
girls, which was how he met his wife, Annie Johns. Higgins
initially adopted Johns in 1905, when she was fifteen; he made
her his sole heir. In 1908 she and Higgins were married, despite
the scandal. They had three children. Higgins died in San
Antonio on June 5, 1955, and was buried in Mission Burial Park.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Robert W.
McDaniel and Henry C. Dethloff,
Pattillo Higgins and the Search for Texas Oil
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989). Edgar
Wesley Owen, Trek of the Oil
Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum
(Tulsa: American Association for Petroleum Geologists, 1975).
Christine Moor Sanders,
Captain George Washington O'Brien and the
History of the Gladys City Company at Spindletop
(1992).
Spindletop/Gladys City Boomtown Museum: A
Guide and a History (Beaumont: Lamar
University, 1992).
Tracé Etienne-Gray
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