Santa Rita, Texas

01The Well That Named the Town

The story of Santa Rita begins not with a settlement but with a drill bit. In January 1919, Reagan County lawyer and World War I veteran Rupert P. Ricker used a 1917 Texas law permitting oil leases on state land to file on 431,360 acres of University of Texas holdings across Reagan, Upton, Irion, and Crockett counties. Ricker sold his interest to a syndicate that became the Texon Oil and Land Company, and on August 23, 1921 — just hours before the permit would have expired — driller Carl Cromwell spudded a well in Section 2, Block 2 of the University lands. According to the Texas State Historical Association, a group of Catholic women investors in the venture had asked a priest to bless the rig and suggested naming it for Santa Rita of Cascia, the patron saint of impossible causes.

For 646 days Cromwell ground downward at an average of less than five feet a day. Early on May 28, 1923, with his tool dresser Dee Locklin beside him, the well "roared to life" and sprayed crude across a 250-yard circle. Santa Rita No. 1 was the first producing well on University land and the discovery well of the Big Lake oil field — the opening shot of the Permian Basin boom.

02A Company Camp on the Santa Fe

Two years after the gusher, in 1925, the Texon Oil and Land Company platted a small community for its workers along the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient (soon Santa Fe) rail line in southwestern Reagan County and called it Santa Rita, after the well. The railroad, according to the Handbook of Texas, asked the company to change the name to Rita Santa to avoid confusion with an existing Santa Rita stop on its New Mexico line, and on schedules and shipping manifests that inverted name stuck — though locals kept calling the place Santa Rita.

The town was never large. It reached roughly 350 residents by 1933, after the original operator sold out in 1929 and other firms moved crews into the field. A post office is not recorded for the camp itself; mail for the oilfield moved primarily through nearby Texon and Big Lake. Industry was oil, full stop: pump jacks, tank batteries, a bunkhouse culture of roughnecks and tool pushers working the Big Lake field that Santa Rita No. 1 had cracked open.

03What Happened to Santa Rita?

The same geology that made Santa Rita made it fragile. As production around Big Lake tapered through the late 1930s and the richer discoveries of the Permian shifted operator attention northward and westward, the camp emptied in stages. By 1945 only about 100 people still lived at Santa Rita; by 1957 the Handbook of Texas records that the town had disappeared entirely. There was no single catastrophe — no fire, no bust headline — just the slow arithmetic of a company town whose company no longer needed it.

The well itself outlasted the settlement by a wide margin. Santa Rita No. 1 pumped nearly continuously until it was finally plugged in 1990, after 67 years of production. In 1940, the University of Texas had already moved the original wooden derrick and drilling equipment to its Austin campus, where it still stands near Martin Luther King Boulevard as a monument to the royalties that helped build the University of Texas and Texas A&M systems.

04Can You Visit the Site Today?

The mapped coordinates for Santa Rita sit on open rangeland in Reagan County, roughly eleven miles from the county seat at Big Lake and well off paved highway. The land is state-owned (University Lands) and primarily leased for grazing and continued oil and gas activity; there is no townsite park, no preserved street grid, and no public interpretive trail at the settlement itself. Visitors interested in the story generally stop instead at the Santa Rita No. 1 historical marker along U.S. Highway 67 west of Big Lake, where a replica pumpjack and signage mark the discovery-well location, and at the original derrick on the UT Austin campus.

Drivers heading out to the general area should treat it as working ranch and oilfield country: unpaved leases, active trucks, fenced private pasture, and little shade. The Texas heat here is unforgiving from late spring through early fall.

05What Remains of Santa Rita Today

Almost nothing of the company camp survives above ground. The Handbook of Texas and the Texas Almanac both record the settlement as no longer existing, and field reports describe the site as cleared pasture with scattered industrial debris rather than standing structures. What endures is the name — stamped on a famous well, on the relocated derrick in Austin, on the Permian Basin's origin story, and on the Permanent University Fund that those royalties helped create. For a town that lasted barely thirty years and never topped four hundred people, that is an outsized afterlife: Santa Rita the place is gone, but Santa Rita the idea still funds classrooms from El Paso to College Station.