Most Panhandle towns had an orderly start, but in March 1926, Borger blew in hard like a dystopic derecho rolling over the once-tranquil hills and prairies of southern Hutchinson County.
Then, after a spell of unadulterated hog-wildedness, Borger started going to church and joined the Kiwanis Club on its path to respectability. But when the Panhandle family gathers to reminisce, we still tell stories about the Borger of the imagination, to remind ourselves that we’re capable of kicking up a little dust in the pursuit of our dreams.
Borger’s origins lay in the nascent Panhandle oil and gas industry, which got its start a decade prior to the city’s founding. In 1916, a group of Amarillo businessmen got wind that an Oklahoma geologist by the name of Charles Newton Gould had a decent track record of locating hidden oil reserves deep under the prairie sod. Gould’s knowledge was based on hydrological studies he made for the government in 1903, studies that included the geology of the Texas Panhandle. He was summoned to Amarillo, and with his old maps guiding the way, oil exploration started on the Masterson Ranch north of Amarillo in December 1918. Instead of producing an oil gusher, that first well tapped into a huge reserve of natural gas.
Now gas is good, and it can make you rich, but oil is Rockefeller rich and the Panhandle wanted a gusher. In 1921, the first oil was finally tapped in Carson County, but it required a pump to bring it to the surface. Then, in 1923, a drilling rig in Hutchinson County punched through to an actual flow, and it was game on. Several more oil strikes made the news in the days and months leading up to Jan. 11, 1926, when the big bang of Panhandle oil occurred on Dixon Creek in southern Hutchinson County. Sherman D. “Tex” McIlroy, a local wildcatter, had completed the Smith-Capers No. 1 well almost a year earlier, but had a hunch to drill it deeper. All it took was two more feet of effort and McIlroy had himself a bonafide gusher, just like in the movies, producing 7,000 barrels a day.
Enter Asa P. “Ace” Borger. In early 1926, he was living in Cromwell, Oklahoma, a boomtown he helped develop after a big oil strike east of Oklahoma City. It is likely Borger was monitoring oil news out of the Texas Panhandle, but a call from his sister, Wilma, reportedly spurred him into action. Wilma was the wife of a Gulf Oil foreman exploring on the Four Sixes Ranch, and news of McIlroy’s good fortune traveled fast. Within weeks of McIlroy’s gusher, Ace Borger showed up on the scene and purchased 240 acres from rancher John Frank Weatherly, just south of the Canadian River in southern Hutchinson County. He intended to develop another booming oil town.
By early March, Amarillo newspapers were advertising lots in the new town that bore Ace Borger’s name. The sale started on March 8, 1926, now considered the birthday of the city of Borger. Within 90 days an estimated 45,000 people—roughly the 1925 population of Austin—had crowded into the Borger area, concentrated along a mile stretch of a muddy and chaotic Main Street.
The famed artist Thomas Hart Benton somehow wound up in Borger in those early days and was inspired to paint “Boomtown,” a portrait of Borger that captures the color and entropy of so much life happening in such a small space. And a reporter named E.B. Garnett with the Kansas City Star painted vivid word pictures in a firsthand account, describing the assault on the senses gifted by a slog down Main Street.
“Borger at last. Borger with its one main street more than a mile long, lined on both sides with helter-skelter, one-story frame buildings and shacks … Borger, with its one main street literally paved with black gold—thick, greasy, grimy over the dirt roadway cut down two-and-a-half feet from the level of the crude earth banks which serve as curbing … Borger, where men are happy and women are more or less miserable.”
The men and women who formed this teeming mass of humanity mostly showed up for honest work, though a notable few were not afraid to break laws or bend social mores in pursuit of a dollar. Born during Prohibition, moonshining and its associated violence quickly took hold in Borger, along with gambling and prostitution. And murder.
By 1929, efforts were underway to clean Borger up, led by a newly appointed district attorney, John A. Holmes. When Holmes went too far, he was assassinated in his driveway on Sept. 13, 1929—an act that compelled Texas Gov. Dan Moody to declare martial law. And Ace Borger himself was brutally gunned down in the post office of his namesake city in 1934. Eight years past its founding, boomtown Borger could still be a dangerous place.
Things eventually settled down and civic life grew more respectable. By the 1950s, Borger had taken on the appearance of a progressive Panhandle city. Industry flourished, jobs were plentiful and Chesty Walker coached his Phillips Blackhawks to a state football championship in 1954.
A century after its founding, we can better understand how Borger’s success shaped the development of the wider region. Borger’s fortunes helped build “skyscrapers” in downtown Amarillo and propelled the growth of several towns in its orbit. Its oil-related industries provided jobs for legions of rural residents seeking to make something of themselves. Borger is emblematic of why the Texas Panhandle is so strangely appealing in spite of the grit we sometimes grind between our molars in pursuit of a better life.
