Oil Boom History on Display
Their watercolor paintings of derricks hung in a line along one wall of the Bradley High School auditorium. The fourth-graders, students of Gail Mills listened to her father's stories of oil fields in southwest Arkansas and then created the pictures to demonstrate what they learned.
Students of Judge Larry, Jr., and Robert Beaird of Bradley High School displayed artifacts and replicas of oil industry artifacts as well as information about the natural history of the Red River area. James F. Willis, Ph.D., of Southern Arkansas University at Magnolia described the history of the oil boom of the 1920s in southern Arkansas. Afterwards, D. L. Monk of Stamps, who attended the program with his wife, Sonya Monk, a teacher at Bradley, described his career in the "oil patch," the oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
See for Yourself!
Visit the Arkansas Oil and Brine Museum to learn more about the oil boom
in southwest Arkansas. Then take a self-guided tour of oilfields in Union
and Ouachita counties, using a brochure the museum provides:
Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources, 3853 Smackover Highway, Smackover,
AR. 870-725-2877. Free admission
Fifth-grade oil well art
Brothers Rubin, Marion, and Frank Coe (back row: second, third and fourth from left) pose in front of a steam engine in an oil field in southwest Arkansas in about 1926. (Photo courtesy of Callie Coe, great-granddaughter of Rubin Coe.)
