Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
We said goodbye to Baton Rouge and headed west across the Mississippi River on our way to Texas.
We stopped in Beaumont, Texas to see the world’s second-largest fire hydrant. The 24 foot hydrant in front of the Fire Museum of Texas was donated to the city by the Walt Disney Company in 1999. The giant hydrant can actually blast 1500 gallons of water a minute! When it was built, it was the world’s largest fire hydrant, but Columbia, SC now has one that is 40 feet tall! I guess we will have to plan a trip to South Carolina.
The Fire Museum is closed on Sundays so we made our way to the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum.
The museum opened at 1pm and we were the first visitors so we had to wait for them to open all of the buildings.
The museum commemorates the discovery of oil at the Spindletop Hill salt dome in Beaumont on January 10, 1901. The discovery sparked the oil boom in Texas that continues today. By 1902, there were over 500 Texas corporations doing business in Beaumont! Many of the major oil companies were born at Spindletop, or grew their corporate size as a result of their involvement at Spindletop, including Gulf Oil, Sun Oil, Magnolia Petroleum, and Exxon Company.
After the discovery of oil, Beaumont went from a population of about 9,000 to 50,000 in less than a year. The buildings in the museum house artifacts from all the different businesses in the Spindletop/Gladys City boom town. By the late 1920s, the oil was depleted and the area became a ghost town! When new drilling techniques were developed the oil industry in the area was revitalized until the 1950s, when again, the oil was depleted.
We only spent about an hour at the museum, but gained a greater appreciation of life during that time period.
As we headed west the Houston skyline came into view.
I-10 goes right through the heart of the city, and so does the traffic! There were five lanes of traffic each direction, as well as two lanes of toll road and two lanes of frontage road! In the middle of all this, we ran into 11 miles of two lane traffic. There was construction and accidents which slowed traffic to about 15-25 mph! We were happy once we got out of the construction zone!
We also saw this huge smoke plume as we and could see flames when we got closer, but couldn’t tell if it was from a petro-chemical plant, or not.
We ended our day in Columbus, Texas. We had dinner at Nancy’s Steak House. The food was good and the service was super-friendly. It was a nice end to our day! Tomorrow, on to San Antonio.
The museum commemorates the discovery of oil at the Spindletop Hill salt dome in Beaumont on January 10, 1901. The discovery sparked the oil boom in Texas that continues today. By 1902, there were over 500 Texas corporations doing business in Beaumont! Many of the major oil companies were born at Spindletop, or grew their corporate size as a result of their involvement at Spindletop, including Gulf Oil, Sun Oil, Magnolia Petroleum, and Exxon Company.
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