OIL: Southeastern Boom

“If the Lord will keep His arm around me,” said a Southern oil-lease broker a while back, “I’ll produce oil in Georgia.” Up to last week, Georgia was not yet an oil state—but it had begun to look as if the Lord had His arm around the whole southeastern U.S. Conservative oilmen are still talking conservatively, but even they admit that the Southeast is now enjoying the biggest oil-land boom since the 1930s.

Mississippi Mud. Heidelberg, a dirt-poor whistle stop (pop. 615) in the red-clay hills of Jasper County, Mississippi, is the proud site of the largest gusher east of the Mississippi River. With nine derricks sticking up through its cow-dunged streets (one derrick is in the yard of its red-brick schoolhouse), and a tent town of oilmen and their families on its outskirts, Heidelberg is a major oil field—thanks to Gulf Refining’s Lewis-Morrison No. 1. Lewis-Morrison produced 2,500 bbl. in a choked-down 24-hr, run last week, and the roughnecks around the derrick swore it would produce from 5,000 to 7,000 bbl. if it were opened up wide,.

Last week Jasper County farmers like T. D. Lewis, who used to think $1 to $5 an acre was fair enough, were haughtily turning down $5,000 an acre for their land.* In the nearby county seat of Paulding, the tiny brick courthouse bulged with lawyers wrestling with the legal tangles that resulted when the old frame courthouse burned down in 1932 and most of the county’s land records went with it. Oilmen, betting that Mississippi would become a major oil-producing state, excitedly pointed out that Heidelberg’s oil sands are 200 ft. thick; a 30-ft. oil sand was supposed to be “good” in Texas and Oklahoma.

Hope and Politics. Mississippi’s boom is so far the Southeast’s best, but at least five other states have oil fever:

¶ Boom-conscious Florida has been searching for oil since 1901, and its Legislature has a standing offer of a $50,000 prize for the first commercial well. No one has collected yet, but Jersey Standard’s big Texas subsidiary, Humble Oil, has struck oil at 11,626 ft. at an Atlantic Coast Line R.R. tank stop 28 miles north of Everglades City, and is hopefully drilling two more tests. Florida’s county weeklies are having a field day announcing new leases, with the price for once near-worthless land up 150% from a year ago.

¶ In southern Georgia only a half-dozen wells have been drilled, but 8,000,000 acres are already under lease, mostly to big companies like Humble, which have already spent more than $2,000,000 for test drillings. In the little turpentine town of Waycross, near the Florida line, oilmen are so thick that the Chamber of Commerce has taken over the whole second floor of the Ware Hotel to accommodate them—and its own Oil and Gas Committee.

¶ Alabama, in search of oil since 1870, sank some 200 wells without success before the first producer came in last February, in Choctaw County, 75 miles northwest of Mobile. By last week there were three small producers, and almost every acre in 15 counties was under lease to big oil companies.

¶ Mass leasing by what the industry calls “responsible oilmen” is under way in North and South Carolina, too. (North Carolina was also titillated last week by new exploratory drilling for coal, financed by the U.S. Bureau of Mines.)

All this activity fortified an ancient hope of U.S. geologists: that the great Gulf oil strata of Texas and Louisiana sweep eastward clear to the Atlantic and northward along the coastline, perhaps all the way up to Maryland. It will be years before that hope is finally confirmed or disproved. But meanwhile the southeastern boom fosters a nearer-term political purpose for the rugged individualists of the U.S. oil industry. As Oil Czar Ickes backs his unpopular Arabian pipeline (TIME, Feb. 14, et seq.) with dire warnings that the U.S. “cannot oil another war,” the industry can use every new oil strike at home as an argument against him.

* Said Mr. Lewis philosophically: “Money isn’t everything. We’ve got money enough now to get anything we neEd, but we can’t get any good corn meal.”