382C 2011

The Oral History of the Texas Oil Industry project was supported by the Walter Benona Sharp Fund. Its origins lay in the 1951 gathering of oil pioneers at Beaumont in honor of the Spindletop discovery. At that time, Mrs. Estelle B. Sharp, wife of one of the early Spindletop drillers, began to see the need to gather the recollections of these pioneers before they, like the pioneers of trail driving and railroading, were lost. Through her contributions and those of others interested in recording the story of Texas oil, the project was begun in the summer of 1952 under the auspices of the Archives at The University of Texas.

A major collection documenting the development of the Texas oil industry from the turn of the century to 1950, these records include 218 taped interviews of oral reminiscences of pioneers in all phases of oil fields and oil booms--roughnecks, drillers, promoters, financiers, contractors, leasemen and law officers. The project was begun by sixteen interviewers who recorded on tape the memories of persons who had first-hand knowledge of the history or lore of the early oil industry in Texas.

In the 1980s, 179 transcripts of the taped interviews were indexed by ten students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at The University of Texas at Austin, as a group project for the Indexing and Abstracting course under the direction of Professor Eugene B. Jackson. Three decades later, students from the renamed School of Information are now creating rich media versions of the interviews.