Hohhertz Story

Hohhertz Oil Field Camp

Invites Past into Present

By Jeff Clark

            Folks who say Texas history never dies haven’t driven enough dusty back roads. One passes old foundations, stacked rock walls and “out of place” fence rows knowing that Lives unfolded out there.

            Lives that were never written down.

            Teams of archeologists, historians and forensic investigators could descend on the place, I suppose. Years and millions of dollars later they could piece together a glossy paper guess about the people who lived out there.

            But without those people, it’d still be a guess.

            I was told about the Hohhertz Camp, a Texas & Pacific Coal & Oil Company camp located on Hohhertz Road, straddling the southeastern border between Palo Pinto and Stephens Counties. I drove out.

            I didn’t see a lot.

            Like others from my instant-messaging generation, I don’t have the time or that team of specialists to help uncover all the lost places I hear about.

            All those clues calling from behind barbed wire fence rows.

Hohhertz Camp was started by the T & P Coal & Oil Company sometime before 1917. Billy Gordon and his dad W.K. of Thurber fame were said to be hunting around Hohhertz when the McClesky oil well blew in that year, setting off the short-lived Ranger Oil Boom. They returned to their car, finding a note on their steering wheel announcing the news. That’s the earliest date I could verify. Seeping oil bedeviled several coal mines to the south and southeast of the Hohhertz area in the late 1800s, considered a nuisance by mine owners until Spindletop taught them better.

Oil camps were temporary settlements where men drilled then pumped crude oil from the ground. The T & P believed in owning everything – the land, the store, families’ homes, the school, the office, the recreation hall, probably some tents. Think Thurber, but smaller, more mobile.

There might’ve been 250 living in the community near its beginning. When the wells were all drilled, this number tapered down over the years.

Towards the 1930s, Hohhertz Camp changed from drilling, to mostly pumping and maintenance. Make sure the oil continues to flow, but we’ll be in Midland or Odessa if you need us.

I went through lots of folks who held small pieces of the puzzle until I happened upon the Sinclair girls – Ellen, Norma and Billye. They grew up there. And then Stanley Bowen. His childhood memories were shaped a few yards down the 1 x 12 wooden side walk from the Sinclair house.

I pulled up a chair. Took out a pen.

Hohhertz Camp was a community in every sense of the word. The first row of five or six identical company-owned houses lining Hohhertz Road faced south, just across the Stephens County line.

There were three rows of these houses, maybe 18 total. There were four or five more homes scattered south into Palo Pinto County along this road. Bowen remembered about 18 families in the 1930s and 1940s.

The Sinclair girls’ daddy William Bryan Sinclair probably worked in Hohhertz longer than anyone, he maintaining a pump station down the hill through the trees adjacent to the Hohhertz Ranch until he retired in 1965. Sinclair could fix or build most anything. Rattlesnakes slithered the countryside then and now. Below that hill sat a huge gas engine (called “The Power” by residents) that ran 15 – 23 rod lines powering pumping oil rigs in the fields.

The Sinclair house started with two bedrooms, but Mr. Sinclair added a third. They had a bathroom and shower, living room and kitchen. Their yard had cut grass and rock-lined flower beds. If you’ve never been out to that part of the world, it’s rough rocky country.

The Sinclairs had a garden.

The camp houses boasted natural gas and indoor plumbing, but no electricity until the REA years later. The Wirt Goodsons owned a Maytag washing machine, though they had to heat the water in big boiling pots and “prime” the clothes with the rub board first.

Toward the 1940s and 1950s there were about 20 oil wells on the 800+ acre Stuart Place, the southern area of Hohhertz. Lone Star Gas had a camp out there somewhere too.

Early Hohhertz Camp was said to have a one room school on the south side of the road (below the water tower) that closed around 1930. The Sinclair girls remember bus rides to Caddo through 6^th grade, then junior and senior high school students being bussed to Breckenridge.

Families paid rent. Twelve unmarried pumpers lived in a bunkhouse where meals were served. A party line phone connected these homes across the cattle guard, a T & P company sign welded overhead. The elevated water tank looks like a brother to the one at Thurber’s Big Lake. Both are still in place. The still standing weathered barn at the ridge of Hohhertz Camp held a big “pulling machine” used around the oil field for various tasks.

Kids used to play kick the can, ante over, took walks, rode bikes and played ball in the street. The most vivid activity I heard about was their Color Stores. These stores’ “inventory” consisted of bottles the kids filled with colored water, which they would then “sell” to each other. Stanley's brother Junior Bowen always came up with odd colors that nobody else could figure out how to make.

Paper dolls were a big item, cutting the dolls out of Sears Catalog, using candy boxes as houses, making all sorts of "furniture" then pulling the candy boxes along with a string (moving their houses from place to place).    

The boys had rough hewn clubhouses out in the countryside where they’d smoke grapevine and carry on as boys will.

All these kids remembered the Color Stores.

Families traveled to Ranger to buy groceries and watch wrestling and boxing matches. Dave Mitchell had a hoedown at one of the houses – guitars and banjos making everyone hoop and holler with delight.

The Sinclairs remember a little store with a little bit of everything. Troyce Boone’s dad Daniel ran the Hohhertz Store in its earliest days. I don’t know if he owned it or just managed it for the company. Bowen remembered Mrs. Herrington running this store in the 30s and 40s. Then the Roaches. Mrs. Herrington lived in a company house, though she was not a company employee like everyone else.

The T & P Office was on the south side of the road. Don Bonney was the big boss, the superintendent, a nice man, the Sinclairs remembered. Everybody liked him.

T & P fashioned a recreation building out of an empty house where women quilted and chatted, a quilting frame hanging from the ceiling. The men played pool, dominoes and 42. A little friendly wagering.

Rodney Mitchell spent 1946 in Hohhertz, his first year of life. He remembers 30 people living there then, the water tower on left, clapboard shacks scattered all about.

Dean and Lois Wilson were the last to live in company housing there. They moved their house to Strawn where it still sits. Hohhertz was a place where families were raised, where couples fell in love, where life was lived then passed on to children.

            Like many T & P operations, most of the actors in this play moved on. There are a few down the hill in Strawn’s Mount Marion Cemetery, maybe a few more toward Necessity.

Hohhertz Camp the place is empty. The community is scattered out there in the world, for a while longer, stretched thin by decades of moving forward to whatever came next.

If you read this and you have memories of old Hohhertz Camp, shoot me an email. Pull up a chair with the others. We’re waiting to hear from you.

Special thanks to Troyce Boone, Stanley Bowen, Rodney Mitchell, Norma Sinclair Mannon, Ellen Sinclair Turner and Sherry Stuard.