GALLERY
Rural Businesses
Rural businesses stand where a commodity meets its transport — the grain elevator by the rails, the derrick over the seam; remove the road out and the building empties.
ON THE FLOOR
Charles Horton Cooley
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“You learned who you are by watching what other people reflected back at you. The mirror, it turns out, was people all along.”
ON THE FLOOR
Edward Soja
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“Space is not the stage the story happens on - it is one of the actors. Ask WHERE, and half the mystery answers itself.”
ON THE FLOOR
George Herbert Mead
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“The self is a conversation: the I speaking, the Me listening with everyone else's ears. You rehearse society every time you think.”
The Country Elevator
Wooden towers by the railroad track, taller than anything else in town. Wheat came in by wagon on one side and left by boxcar on the other; the building in between is the whole business.
The Farmers' Elevator
The same tower, but the sign says who owns it: the farmers. A cooperative elevator - the sellers built their own buyer so the line companies could not set the price alone.
The Terminal Elevator
Concrete silos patched with tar, big as a city block. The country elevators send their wheat here; the mills and the lake boats take it from here. The rural business's city end.
The Buffalo Elevators, 1900
The Buffalo River lined with elevators, lake boats alongside, the tallest buildings in the city and none of them for people. The first elevators were invented here, in 1842, to unload ships.
The Lucas Gusher, 1901
A wooden derrick on a salt dome south of Beaumont, and a column of oil twice its height blowing into the sky. January 10, 1901: a hundred thousand barrels a day, and nobody knew how to close it for nine days.
The Kilgore Derricks, 1939
A main street with derricks on the sidewalks, in the back lots, over the bank - more than a thousand in the town limits. The East Texas field was under the town, so the town drilled itself.
The Derrick Forest, Kilgore, 1943
Steel derricks standing shoulder to shoulder, closer than trees in a wood, four years after Russell Lee shot the same town. The boom has become a standing forest; the wells are pumping now, not drilling.
Kilgore from the Street, 1943
The second frame: derricks over the rooftops, seen from the street the way a resident saw them - a skyline of steel lattice where a town's church spires would be.
The Roughneck
A man at the foot of a derrick, the drilling floor behind him, in the work clothes of the trade. The rural business has a workforce, and the workforce came from farms.
The Roustabouts, Seminole
Roustabouts at rest during a lull in painting a derrick in the Seminole field, Oklahoma - the maintenance crew, not the drilling crew: the men who kept the standing forest standing.
The Kansas Pumps
Derricks and pumpjacks in a Kansas wheat field - the two rural businesses of this hall in one frame. The elevator town and the derrick town are, here, the same farm.
The Nodding Horse
Closer: the pumpjack itself, the walking beam and the counterweight, the machine that runs after the boom is over - for forty years, unattended, a few barrels a day.
The World's Richest Acre, Today
Downtown Kilgore now: a few derricks restored and some scaled-down, standing on a sliver of the block that once held 24 wells. The business became a monument; the town kept the street.
Oil in the Ocean, Summerland
Wooden piers running out into the surf with derricks on their ends: Summerland, California, where in 1896 the first oil wells in the world were drilled from the sea. The rural business follows the commodity off the land.
From the gallery's own wall — "The Kilgore Derricks, 1939" (Russell Lee, FSA/OWI, Library of Congress).
🎧 A moment to consider
What will you carry out of this room?