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Trees City
In the
early 1900’s the area was thick with timber, moss, and
moss, and fog. A few shallow trails, far from being
considered roads, existed. The earth seemed to be solid,
but this apparently proved false as tales have been told
about quicksand swallowing teams of mules and men.1
But here between the
Texas state line and Caddo Lake’s banks was the oil
boomtown of Trees City. The town has lost most of its
identity, but in its heyday the community had stores, a
church, a hotel, a barber shop, and a doctor’s office.
All that remains today are a few houses on Highway 2. 2
W.
P. Stiles moved to Caddo Parish in the early part of the
twentieth century to open a sawmill.
Dallas
investors backed him in purchasing the Hart cotton
plantation, which contained several thousand acres. In
1908 he was a well-off farmer near Oil City and leased
about 130,000 acres to Oklahoma natives Joe C. Trees and
Mike Benedum.3 A few shallow wells had been
drilled in the area, but had yielded no oil. Trees Oil
Company drilled just six feet deeper than where the
Texas Company had abandoned their tests, and struck
oil.4
After noting that the shack-like saloons in the rough
towns of Oil City and Mooringsport were causing the
employees of Trees Oil Company to get too caught up in
revelry, Stiles established his own town in 1909. He
constructed a dance hall, pool hall, church, and
school.5 Prostitutes and men selling whiskey were
not allowed in the community, and it wasn’t long before
Trees City was known as the most orderly oil town in the
nation.6
The
city was possibly the first town to be built by an oil
company.7 Stiles also built sizeable homes for his
employees so their families could live with them.8
Benedum and Trees developed the cementing process to
stop the earth from caving in when natural gas seeped
out of the ground. These men sold their oil interests in
the field to Standard Oil Company for $6 million in cash
and oil in 1911. After the decline in oil production,
most of the residents moved on to bigger cities.9
The Trees City Office and
Bank
Building,
built in 1910 as the private bank and business office of
W. P. Stiles, was moved to Oil City in 1984 and placed
on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.
The three-room structure had been abandoned for nearly
twenty years prior to its move and restoration.10
In
its early days the mail was hauled in to the pool hall,
dumped on a pool table, and sorted. Then the post office
was constructed in 1912 with 68 mail boxes. The
government later closed down the post office at Trees
because the structure had no sanitary facilities and
Myra Melder, who had worked in the post office for 35
years, was retiring. Vivian’s zip code replaced the
Trees zip code of 71081.
11
References
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