No Texas oil well has had a longer financial afterlife than Santa Rita No. 1. Spudded in January 1921 on University of Texas land in Reagan County and brought in on May 28, 1923, it opened the Big Lake Field and, with it, the Permian Basin. The royalties that followed built the Permanent University Fund, which supports both the University of Texas and Texas A&M systems to this day. The field itself is modest by Permian standards, but its consequences — geologic, financial and institutional — were enormous.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 07919001, 07919581, 07919664, 07919747. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Frank T. Pickrell and Haymon Krupp, operating as the Texon Oil and Land Company, held a lease on University lands in a part of West Texas that most geologists considered unpromising. Driller Carl Cromwell spudded the well in Section 2, Block 2 in January 1921 and drilled for more than two years under difficult conditions. On May 28, 1923, Santa Rita No. 1 came in. The name came from the patron saint of the impossible, invoked by investors who had every reason to expect failure.
The discovery transformed the region. Reagan County shifted from ranching to oil almost overnight, the town of Big Lake boomed, and exploration spread rapidly across what became known as the Permian Basin. For the University of Texas, the well converted two million acres of nearly worthless West Texas land into an income-producing endowment, and the Permanent University Fund it created remains one of the largest institutional endowments in the country.
Big Lake developed through the 1920s with additional shallow Permian pay and deeper Ordovician production found on the structure. Reagan County had produced more than 287 million barrels between 1923 and 1973, and a second boom arrived in 1951 when the Spraberry Trend was developed across the county. The original field has been waterflooded and reworked for generations, and today it produces at modest rates alongside far larger horizontal development in the surrounding area.
Big Lake sits on a structural high near the eastern edge of the Permian Basin, where shallow Permian carbonates of the San Andres and Grayburg overlie a much deeper Ordovician Ellenburger dolomite objective. The shallow pay is dolomitized, moderately porous, and typical of the platform carbonates that made the early Permian famous. The Ellenburger is a fractured dolomite reached at far greater depth. This stacked configuration is common along the Permian’s eastern shelf and is one reason the field supported development across several distinct drilling eras.
Like most Permian carbonate fields of its generation, Big Lake moved from primary production to waterflooding as reservoir pressure fell. Injected water sweeps oil through the dolomite toward producing wells and extends field life by decades, which is why fields discovered in the 1920s are still producing a century later. Operators have also recompleted wells between zones and re-entered older wellbores. The additional development in Reagan County over the last fifteen years has been horizontal drilling in the surrounding Spraberry and Wolfcamp section rather than new enhanced recovery in the original field.
Reagan County owners often hold two very different assets at once. Old Big Lake interests behave like conventional waterflood royalties — small, steady and long-lived, with value driven by operating cost and remaining sweep. Horizontal Spraberry and Wolfcamp wells drilled in the same county behave like shale, paying most of their value in the first few years. Confusing the two leads owners to misjudge offers badly in either direction. We buy minerals and royalties in Reagan County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
It was the discovery well of the Big Lake field, drilled on University of Texas land in Reagan County by the Texon Oil and Land Company. Spudded in January 1921, it came in on May 28, 1923. The well proved oil existed in West Texas on a commercial scale and generated the royalties that built the Permanent University Fund.
Not directly. University Lands are state-owned minerals managed for the Permanent University Fund, and they are leased under their own terms. Private minerals in Reagan County are bought, sold and leased independently. What the two share is geology, which is why activity on nearby University acreage can be a useful signal about your own tract.
Because the county produces from very different reservoirs. Legacy Big Lake wells are shallow, flood-supported and steady. Modern horizontal Spraberry and Wolfcamp wells start high and decline sharply. If you hold interests in both, your combined income will look erratic even though each component is behaving normally for its type.