Historic Oil Field
Seminole City is the discovery field of the Greater Seminole area, and one of the most consequential wells in Oklahoma history opened it. On July 16, 1926, the Fixico No. 1 reached the Wilcox sand at 4,073 feet and set off a drilling rush that made Seminole County, for a few years, one of the busiest oil provinces on earth. A century later the field is a mature, low-rate producer, and its main significance for owners is the enormous population of small, inherited royalty interests it left behind.
The Fixico No. 1 came in on July 16, 1926, finding the Ordovician Wilcox sand at 4,073 feet. Earlier discoveries at Wewoka and Cromwell in 1923 had hinted at what the county held, but the Wilcox was on another scale entirely. Within weeks, lease men were working every farmhouse and allotment in the district, and within a year operators had proved up a series of additional pools — Earlsboro, St. Louis, Bowlegs, Little River and Allen — that Oklahoma now counts among its giant fields.
The human scale of the boom was as dramatic as the geology. Seminole County’s population rose from 23,808 in 1920 to 79,621 in 1930, a 234 percent increase, then fell back to 61,201 by 1940 as production declined. Boom camps appeared and vanished, and the town of Seminole itself became briefly notorious. Greater Seminole area production between 1926 and 1936 reached 702,157,800 barrels — roughly 18 percent of all Oklahoma output in those years — from original reserves the state estimates near 822 million barrels.
That much oil, produced that fast, had consequences far beyond the county. Combined with the Oklahoma City discovery and later East Texas, the Seminole flood helped collapse crude prices and made proration, allowables and enforced well spacing politically inevitable. For the reservoir itself, the competitive drilling was costly: pressure that could have lifted oil for decades was spent in a few years. The field has produced at modest rates ever since, supported in places by water injection and worked by small operators.
The pay is the Wilcox sand of the Ordovician Simpson Group, found at 4,073 feet in the discovery well — a clean, porous quartz sandstone capable of very high deliverability where structure closes over it. The field sits on the southern Cherokee Platform, where the Wilcox lies well beneath the Pennsylvanian section that supplies shallower Oklahoma production. Traps mix anticlinal closure with lateral variation in sand development, so both the thickness of pay and the reservoir quality differ from lease to lease within the same pool.
Seminole City produced on natural reservoir drive during the boom, and much of that drive was wasted by unrestrained competitive production. Water injection came later, applied on portions of the field to sweep oil the flush wells had bypassed and to slow the decline. No tertiary project defines the field. The honest description today is a shallow, slow decline supported by injection where it is active, with production measured in a few barrels per well per day and royalty checks scaled accordingly.
The 1926 leases are still the backbone of ownership here, which means most interests have been through four or five generations of Oklahoma probate and are now very small. That history creates two practical problems: title is often unclear, and value is impossible to judge from a monthly check alone. We handle heirship and probate research at our own expense, price by lease and injection status, and buy directly rather than listing. We buy minerals and royalties in Seminole 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 Seminole City field, completed on July 16, 1926, which reached the Wilcox sand at 4,073 feet. It touched off the Greater Seminole boom, the drilling rush that produced six of Oklahoma’s giant oil fields and more than 700 million barrels between 1926 and 1936.
Yes, at stripper rates. The flush production ended within a few years of discovery. What remains is a mature field of low-rate wells, supported in places by water injection, that still pays small royalties on leases signed nearly a century ago.
Start with the county clerk’s records for any deed or reservation in the family name, then follow it through probates and later conveyances. Oklahoma also holds unclaimed property that may include suspended royalties. We do this research for owners at no charge as part of preparing a written offer, and we will tell you if nothing survives.