The Gilded Age through Early Twentieth Century

By 1897, a school for black students in El Dorado was in session. In 1908, Washington High School began enrolling generations of African Americans; it closed in 1969 under district-wide integration.

The construction of railroads in the 1890s led to the county’s greatest economic transformation between the Civil War and the 1920s oil boom. On July 4, 1891, the first passenger train arrived in El Dorado from Camden on a line that the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern quickly acquired. The railroads created the local timber industry. In 1892, J. S. Cargile formed a partnership with some El Dorado businessmen to build a sawmill and a town for workers on Lourtre Creek. The partners formed the Arkansas Southern rail company to extend the Iron Mountain line from El Dorado to the mill. This transit artery led to the founding of Smackover and Junction City as rail terminals; the Union Saw Mill Company built a line in 1904 to the new mill site of Huttig, soon the county’s largest sawmill community. This north-south network supplanted the east-west system between the old river landings and the interior region.

The advent of automobiles and fuel demands during World War I sparked oil exploration in the region. The first Union County leases were bought in 1914, but initial test wells near Urbana and the Columbia County line were dry. In 1921, Dr. Samuel Busey, who had invested in oil leases in Bolivia, arrived in El Dorado and quickly bought a hotel and interest in an oil well. On January 10, 1921, his well erupted with a thick column of oil that soiled clothes on wash lines a mile away. The rural market center was unprepared to become a boomtown. Hotels and rooming houses overflowed, and tent-covered cot spaces, restaurants, and shops went up along South Washington Street. A newspaper reporter noted that a person walking along what became known as “Hamburger Row” could “purchase almost anything from a pair of shoes to an auto, an interest in a drilling tract or have your fortune told.”

Smackover became the second oil boomtown when a discovery oil well confirmed in July 1922 what an earlier gas explosion at a well site had indicated: the Smackover field held tremendous reserves of crude. By 1925, nearly 3,500 wells were pumping sixty-nine million barrels of oil, the greatest rate in the world. The influx of wildcatters and oil field workers overwhelmed local authorities.

The oil booms introduced a new industrial elite into a state where the alluvial cotton-growing region had been the traditional source of wealth. For the rest of the twentieth century, Union County was at the top of per capita income for the state. The county also was among the first to suffer from industrial pollution. The saltwater that surfaced with oil was released to turn surrounding creeks into undrinkable bogs and forests into a scorched landscape. A visitor arriving by train in 1937 recalled, “I wondered what I had come to, it looked like a moonscape.” Environmental efforts would not begin to undo the damage until the end of the century.

Without effective state regulation, drillers ignored basic recovery practices, and production declined markedly by the 1930s. But the county found relief from the Great Depression when the Lion Oil Refining Company financed discovery wells in Shuler Field in 1937. Thomas H. Barton acquired the refining company in 1928 and soon joined Harvey Couch as one of the state’s most notable capitalists and its pioneering philanthropist. His financial support for the state livestock fair and the university medical school were accompanied by large donations to youth organizations. But Barton was a disappointed office seeker, losing to J. William Fulbright in the 1944 race for U.S. Senate. In 1956, Barton sold his company to the Monsanto Corporation. Charles H. Murphy, who took over Murphy Oil Corporation in 1941, kept the family-owned company headquartered in El Dorado and exerted statewide influence through membership on private and public governing boards.

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