Burkburnett is one of the most famous names in Texas oil history. Oil was found west of the town in 1912, but it was the 1918 discovery inside the townsite that produced the derrick-crowded photographs everyone recognizes and inspired the 1940 Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy film Boom Town. More than a century later, Wichita County still produces from the same shallow sands, though the wells are strippers making a few barrels a day. Owners here should know that modern Railroad Commission bookkeeping often files this production under county-wide designations rather than the historic field name.
Source: Texas Railroad Commission production filings, aggregated across RRC field designations 13526500. Reported volumes lag the calendar by several months.
Oil was noticed seeping into Wichita County water wells as early as 1901, and a small producer was operating by 1910. The first Burkburnett discovery came in 1912 west of town. The event that made history came in July 1918, when a well on S. L. Fowler’s farm at the edge of the townsite came in and triggered a stampede. Derricks went up on town lots barely large enough to hold them, and by late 1918 the field was producing on the order of 7,500 barrels a day.
The boom brought roughly twenty thousand people into a town of about a thousand. Nineteen refineries processed local crude, and twenty trains a day ran between Burkburnett and Wichita Falls. Further extensions in 1919 and 1920 pushed the field north and west, and a later strike in 1925 added more. Wichita County’s cumulative production reached about 320 million barrels by 1940 and roughly 430 million by the early 1960s.
What followed was a long, quiet second life. The shallow sands were waterflooded and reworked repeatedly, and small operators kept hundreds of low-rate wells alive through every price cycle. County cumulative production had reached roughly 828 million barrels through 2004. The field is administratively complicated today: much of the production in and around Burkburnett is reported to the Railroad Commission under the Wichita County Regular designation rather than under a historic field name.
Burkburnett produces from shallow Pennsylvanian sands of the Cisco Group, the classic north-central Texas townsite pay, generally found between roughly 1,000 and 1,900 feet with deeper Strawn objectives below. The sands are lenticular and discontinuous, deposited in a shifting deltaic and fluvial system on the eastern flank of the Bend Arch. That geometry is exactly why the 1918 boom looked the way it did: pay was shallow enough to reach with primitive rigs, and productive sands changed from one town lot to the next, which rewarded densely spaced drilling.
Secondary recovery came to the Burkburnett area early, because the shallow sands respond well to waterflooding and the wells are inexpensive to drill and convert. Small operators have run water injection here for generations, often on a lease-by-lease basis rather than through large unitized projects, and many wells have been re-entered, deepened or recompleted into shallower or deeper sands. The result is a field that produces at very low rates per well but has stayed continuously economic for more than a century because both capital and operating costs are so low.
A Burkburnett royalty is the opposite of a shale royalty. Instead of a large front-loaded payment that fades within a few years, it is a small, remarkably persistent stream from flood-supported stripper wells that can continue for decades. That longevity has real value, but it is valued on a different basis than shale, and small monthly checks can hide a substantial underlying interest. Paperwork here is often a century old and imprecise. We buy minerals and royalties in Wichita County and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
The Railroad Commission books a great deal of Wichita County production under a county-wide administrative designation, commonly shown as Wichita County Regular, rather than under the historic Burkburnett field name. Your minerals can sit squarely in the old field and still never have the field name appear on a modern division order or check detail.
Yes, though at stripper rates. The shallow Cisco sands have been produced, waterflooded and reworked for over a century, and hundreds of low-rate wells remain active around Burkburnett and Wichita Falls. Individual wells make only a few barrels a day, but low drilling and operating costs have kept them economic through every price cycle.
That depends on your goals rather than on the size of the check. Small, long-lived interests are often the ones with the messiest title, the most heirs and the highest administrative burden per dollar received. Some owners prefer to keep them for the history; others prefer a one-time payment. We will give you a written number so you can compare honestly.