In Part I, we followed the oil itself. We watched how Marshall County did not erupt into boom overnight, but was slowly and convincingly proven by deep drilling and patient geology. The story ended not with a town or a camp, but with a realization: by 1939, the land east of Madill had crossed a threshold. It was no longer a question of whether oil would sustain development here, but when someone with the experience and resources to recognize that proof would act on it.
Part II is where that answer arrives. This is where Pure Oil Company steps into the story—not as a driller testing a prospect, but as a company making a commitment to a field. And Pure did not commit in half-measures. It did what seasoned oil companies had learned to do in Oklahoma after decades of costly lessons learned in other boom fields. It built a camp.
Long before the names Cumberland, Pure City, or Little City ever appeared in a Marshall County newspaper, the Pure Oil Company had already spent decades learningOklahoma’sground.
Pure did not come to this state as a stranger chasing rumor. It arrived as an operator with history, infrastructure, and experience already rooted in Oklahoma soil. The company that would become Pure Oil began as the Ohio Cities Gas Company in the late nineteenth century, built around natural gas production and distribution in the Appalachian region. But as oil and gas development pushedwestwardinthe early twentieth century, so did the company’s ambitions. Oklahoma—young in statehood but rich in petroleum discovery—quickly drew its attention.
By 1917, Pure had established refining operations in Oklahoma to process crude being produced in the state’s early fields. That date matters. It places Pure’s presence here only ten years after statehood and more than two decades before its arrival in Marshall County. This was not a latecomer chasing opportunity. It was an early participant in Oklahoma’s petroleum development, learning firsthand the patterns, pitfalls, and promises of the state’s geology.
By the mid-1920s, after adopting the name Pure Oil Company, the firm operated refineries not only in Ohio and West Virginia, but also in Seminole, Oklahoma and Texas. The Oklahoma refinery presence placed Pure directly into the logistical network of pipelines, railroads, and production fields that defined the state’s oil economy. The company was not merely purchasing crude from Oklahoma producers— it was refining it, transporting it, marketing it, and building permanent infrastructure around it.
This experience shaped how Pure thought about oil fields.
Oklahoma taught the company hard lessons about boom and bust, about labor instability, and about the chaos that followed sudden discoverieswithoutplanning. In places like the Seminole oil fields, Pure developed a pattern that would later repeat elsewhere in the state: pairing production facilities with company housing, gas plants, and centralized camps designed to stabilize workers and sustain longterm operations. These were not improvised settlements. They were part of a corporate blueprint born from experience.
Photographs preserved today in the University of Oklahoma archives show Pure Oil camps and gas plants in Seminole County— rows of company houses, utility structures, and orderly layouts that look strikingly similar to what would later appearatCumberland.These were not improvised settlements. They were part of a corporate blueprint.
By the 1930s, Pure Oil had become comfortable operating in Oklahoma’s varied geology—from the prolific central fields to the more complex formations along theArbuckle-Ouachitatrend. Its geologists and engineers understood how Oklahoma fields behaved over time. They knew which discoveries were fleeting and which had depth.Theyknewhowtoread production patterns, when to invest in infrastructure, and when to wait.
And so, Pure waited. When oil was first discovered in Marshall County in 1909, Pure did not rush in. It did not arrive during the modestgrowthofthe1920s.It watched. It studied. It waited until deep drilling in the late 1930s proved what earlier wells had only suggested— that the oil and gas beneath the land east of Madill were not shallow, isolated pockets, but part of larger, deeper, continuous formations capable of sustaining years of production.
By 1939, Pure Oil had already spent more than twenty years refining Oklahoma crude, building infrastructure in Oklahoma fields, and perfecting a model for operating efficiently in rural oil provinces. When its geologists finally turned their attention to Marshall County, they were not seeing a frontier. They were seeing a familiar pattern—one they had encountered before and learned to recognize with confidence.
Marshall County had crossed the threshold from possibility to certainty. What happened next was not the beginning of Pure Oil’s story in Oklahoma. It was the extension of it.
In 1940, the quiet landscape of Marshall County was transformed when the Pure Oil Company struck oil at the Cumberland field with its Number 1 Little-100 well. The discovery did not merely open a new producing area— it created a new kind of place, one of those mid-century Oklahoma communities that existed because oil required people, and people required a way to live.
That moment came on March 8, 1940, when the Little-100 well flowed oil fromtheBromidesand.What followed was not a cautious, incremental expansion, but a rapid development program that extended beyond Marshall County into Bryan County, altering both counties’ landscapes and economies.
The Cumberland field would ultimately span approximately 32 square miles—roughly twelve miles long and four and a half miles wide—withatotalproductive area estimated at 13,770 acres. Within that broad expanse, the reservoir separated into several high-yield pools, the most notable being the second Oil Creek pool, covering about 600 acres and earning a reputation as the most productive zone in the entire field on a per-acre-foot basis.This was not “creekology” or luck. The discovery of the Cumberland field was the result of a sophisticated, multi-layered scientific strategy that Pure Oil coordinated step by step. First came the surface and subsurface studies—extensive mapping of surface rock layers and analysis of older, shallower well data that led Pure’s geologists to classify the area as one of “unusual interest.” Thencamemagneticsurveys, used to detect variations in the Earth’s magnetic field that could signal deep structural changes in basement rock.Butthedecisivetoolwas the reflection seismograph. Because the underground oil-bearing structure—described as a closed, faulted anticline—was not reflected in the surface rock layers (the Comanche beds), Pure used seismic waves to “see” deeper formations. By recording the timing of waves bouncing off hard rock layers, the company successfully outlined the Cumberland anticline.
Those methods were necessary because of the field’s geologic location: the Cumberland field was located in a down-faulted block of sedimentary rocks on the south flank of the Arbuckle Mountains. The oil-rich structure formed in the late Pennsylvanian period and was later covered by younger rocks that did not retain the same shape, making the trap effectively invisible at the surface. Pure’s reliance on reflection seismology allowed the company to bypass those “blind” layers and pinpoint where to drill. The Little 100 No. 1 confirmed those scientific theories when it flowed oil from the Bromide sand during a drill-stem test, marking the official discovery.
With proof in hand, Pure moved into the field with the kind of disciplined precision the numbers still reveal. During the initial development phase, the company oversaw the drilling of approximately 161 wells. The success rate was remarkably high: 151 were successful oil producers; one was established as a dedicated Hunton limestone gas producer; only 9 dry holes were recorded. The field was almost exclusively Pure’s domain; out of the entire development, only two wells in Section 18 belonged to another operator—Sun Oil Company.
Production came on like a tide. Individual wells initially averaged 2,866 barrels per day, and the oil was typically high-quality Mid-Continent crude extracted from depths of approximately 6,423 feet. By January 31, 1947, less than seven years after discovery, the field had already yielded 22.5 million barrels of oil. And even decades later the legacy continued: by1975,annualproductionin thecounty—drivenlargelyby the Cumberland and nearby North Madill fields—still stood at over 858,000 barrels of oil and 5.8 billion cubic feet of gas.
But Pure understood something the raw production figures do not show: oil does not come out of the ground by geology alone. It comes out because men work the rigs, fix engines, monitor flow, keep accounts, move pipe, drive, weld, and risk themselves in the weather and the dark. And when a field is rural—when it lies outside the reach of established towns—those men have to live somewhere close enough to sustain production. That is how the Pure Oil Camp became inevitable.
To accommodate the sudden influx of workers, Pure built a self-contained community, the Pure Oil Camp, which became a hinge between the industrial field and the human settlement that would rise beside it. Life in the camp centered on 43 neatly arranged houses and a 35-bed bunkhouse for single men. It wasn’t merely a place to sleep; it was a community, a planned environment meant to stabilize the workforce. Families lived in a world defined by oil patch culture, where the steady rhythm of drilling rigs—andthenearbyWarren Petroleum gas plant—gave a sense of industrial security in a county that had long been rural and agricultural. This era marked the peak of oilfield camaraderie, as workers and their families lived in close proximity, sharing prosperity and the grueling labor of the field.
And the record shows that Pure’s commitment was announced publicly almost as soon as the plan was in motion. That changed in early April.
On April 4, 1940, the Madill Record announced the decision that would permanently reshape the eastern portion of the county under a bold, declarative headline: “PURE OIL CO. TO ESTABLISH CAMP IN FIELD — New Townsite, to Be Known as Pure City, Also Planned.”
The wording left little room for doubt. This was not a test or a possibility. It was a plan already in motion.
The paper reported that Pure Oil Company had been given title to 160 acres of land, described precisely as SW ¼ sec. 29, 5s-7e, by Reuel Little and Quinton Little of this city. The location was no accident. The tract lay “in the section immediately joining the one in which the discovery well is located.” Pure was placing its camp at the heart of the field it intended to develop.
The purpose of the camp was stated plainly and without embellishment. According to the Record, it was “thoughtlikelythatthiscamp will be expanded sufficiently to enable the oil company to house workers at this one point for carrying out drilling operations throughout the field.” In other words, Pure intended to consolidate labor, reduce inefficiencies, and create a stable base from which drilling operations across the entire field could be carried out. This was not the language of speculation. It was the language of logistics.
Plans called for the installation of waterworks, sewer systems, and electric lights, ensuring that camp houses would be “modern in every respect.” That detail mattered in rural Marshall County in 1940,becausesuchamenities were not universal. Their inclusion signaledpermanence, planning, and capital. The campwasenvisionedasmore than a cluster of temporary shacks. It was, in effect, a selfcontained industrial village.
But the April 4 announcement revealed something else as well—something that went beyond company operations and into the realm of community. Alongside the camp, the Madill Record reported, a townsite had already been laid out.
Promoted by the same men who conveyed the land to Pure Oil, the town was to be located “just west of the Pure Oil company camp site.” It would be known as Pure City. The paper noted that preliminary work was already underway. The town had been platted. A water well was being drilled as the first step toward a municipal watersystem.Arrangements were to be made for sewer service and electric lights— mirroring the infrastructure planned for the camp itself. Lots would go on sale within the next ten days, and by the end of April, the paper reported, business and home lots would be offered for sale.
The timing was deliberate. The camp would bring workers. Workers would bring their families. Families would need goods and services that the company would not provide. Pure City was positioned to meet that need, standing just outside the bounds of corporate control but entirely dependent on corporate presence.
The Madill Record recognized the significance of what wasunfolding andresponded accordingly. This was not another drilling update buried inside the paper. It was framed as the arrival of something new and consequential.
Other newspapers quickly followed. Within days, the Daily Ardmoreite echoed the story under its own declaration: “NEW OIL TOWN TO BE KNOWN AS PURE CITY.”
The Ardmore paper confirmed that Reuel and Quinton Little had laid out the town near the Pure Oil Cumberland wildcat, which the company was due to test soon. It emphasized the same details: the sale of the campsite, the platting of the town, the drilling of a well for waterworks, and the imminent sale of lots.
And on April 11, 1940, the Tulsa Tribune carried the news farther afield: “‘PureCity’StateOilTown Newest.”
From Tulsa’s vantage point, Pure City was Oklahoma’s newest oil town, situated near the southern border in eastern Marshall County at the site of Pure Oil’s Cumberland well.
What these reports collectively reveal is the speed and confidence with which Pure moved. There was no prolonged courtship, no extended testing phase. The decision to establish a camp—andtodosoatscale— followed quickly on the heels of successful deep drilling. The company acted as it always had: methodically, deliberately, and with infrastructure to match ambition.
This was not a temporary encampment erected to serve a single well. It was a commitment— to the field, to the county, and to the belief that oil east of Madill would sustain years of production. The ground had already spoken. Now the company answered. And in the shadow of that corporateanswer,thehuman answer had already begun.
The revelation that the town of Pure City was part of the April 4 announcement proved that it was not an afterthought. It was simultaneous. This was not a rumor outrunning the drill bit. It was survey stakes and deadlines.
Then came the detail that fixed Pure City permanently in local memory.
Under the subheading “Brotherly Love?”, the Madill Record stepped away from legal descriptions and infrastructure and gave readers somethingmoredurablethan acreage: personality. The town, the paper explained, would consist “principally of three long streets.” The town consisted of three long streets that ran east and west, with numerous side streets that ran north and south between the three long blocks. These side streets were named A, B, C,DStreets,andsoon—plain lettering, functional and unromantic, as if the place had no time for ornament.
The main street was named Reuel Street—Reuel named it after himself. Reuel Street is now known as Highway 199. The middle street was named Main Street, as it is today. The northernmost long street was named Quinton, after Quinton Little.
And then Reuel, with the kind of grin small-town papers loved to preserve in ink, explained that the layout was not entirely impartial: “Quintin’s sure going to holler when he finds out about it—but I’ve laid it out so that Reuel Street will be the main thoroughfare, with all the good stores, while Quintin Street will be a back street reserved for honkytonks and other joints,” Reuel explained.
It was humor, but it was also a frank description of oil-town geography: commerce on the main drag, vice pushed to the margins, and a street plan that admitted— before the first storefront was finished—what kinds of businesses tend to follow a pay line.
Infrastructure followed almost immediately. Work began on a new road from Madill to the oil field, graded and graveled using WPA labor to handle the heavy traffic oil development would bring. WPA crews, tractors, graders, and trucks were put to work. Sixty men went to work initially, with plans to increase that number to one hundred. The road was not merely convenient; it was a declaration. It meant this place was intended to be reached, supplied, and sustained.
By mid-summer, the transformation was unmistakable.
On July 18, 1940, the Madill Record reported that Pure City had shown “rapid expansion.” The article noted that “almost overnight, an oil town that promises to be flourishing has grown from an almost bare location.” A grocery store, a lumber yard, cafés, and houses with baths were already part of the picture—houses with baths, a detail that mattered because it signaled modern expectations, not rough camp improvisation. Forty men worked on new buildings. Entire blocks of lots sold.
Inside the Pure Oil camp itself, contracts were let for houses, bunkhouses, and a mess hall—structures designed to be dismantled and moved when needed elsewhere. Even as the town took root, the camp remained true to its company logic: functional, organized, and— at least in theory—movable.
And then, quietly, the name changed. On July 25, 1940, the Madill Record announced with characteristic brevity: “Pure City is now Little City.”
The corporate name gave way to the founders’ name. What had begun as an oil company’s companion settlement became something more personal, more local, more enduring. In less than four months, a field had produced a camp, a camp had produced a town, and a town had claimed a permanent name. Streets had been laid out. Jokes had been printed. Businesses had opened. Families had moved in. Little City had arrived—not with ceremony, but with purpose.
By about August 1940, the townhadbecomespecificand unmistakable in its everyday details. Little City had a grocery store, a barber shop, two cafés, a lumber yard, a barbecue pit, a dance hall, a honky tonk, and a few other businesses. There was also a hospital established by Dr. Walter Hardy of Ardmore. Dr. Hardy purchased a 100-by-100-foot lot from the Littles, then purchased and moved to town a 72-foot Pullman train car. The hospital was established in that Pullman car and run by Dr. E. S. Emil.
And yet, after the name changed,nothingelsedid—at least not right away.
At first, Little City, like many oil-field communities born in the mid–twentieth century, existed in the space between formality and function. It had streets, homes, businesses, and a population thatroseandfellwithproduction, but it did not require the legal machinery of a town to justify its existence. It was there because people lived there. That was enough.
By the time the corporate name “Pure City” was already slipping away and “Little City” was taking root in the public tongue, the town’s earliest weeks were being recorded not as a theory but as a daily ledger— tracking who moved in, what opened, what got built, what broke, what everybody teased each other about, and what the boom felt like while it was still new enough to smell like fresh lumber and raw gravel.
The excitement of the new town was so extensive that the Madill Record began a section of the paper entitled, “Big News From Little City.” The weekly piece even had its own graphic topping the article each week. The first entry in the section “Big News From Little City” appeared on August 1, 1940.
The first letter arrived with a simple dateline: “Little City, Oklahoma, July 29, 1940.” It did not read like news. It read like a place clearing its throat and speaking for the first time. The voice belonged to a man who signed himself, with unmistakable pride, “Your newest reporter, Andy Massingill.” And through his words, Little City introduced itself not as an oil statistic, not as a corporate camp, but as a living town taking shape day by day.
Andy began with houses. There were nine dwelling houses nearing completion, he wrote, and they would be finished by August 1. That detail mattered. Before there were streets busy with commerce or nights lit by electricity, there were roofs going up and families arriving. He recorded the first of them by name: Mr. and Mrs. C. A. Churchwell and their son, Wylie—the first family to move into Little City. In a place barely weeks old, being first was already something worth writing down.
And then, almost without transition, the businesses (Continued from page 5A)
began to step into view—just as they always do in a boom settlement. Not fancy establishments. Not ambitious enterprises. But the essential fixtures of oil-field life.
City Manager Jim Adams’ café was, as Andy put it, “leading with its right.” Inside, Mr. Scrue Driver presided as chief cook, a man apparently as comfortable testing telephones as flipping burgers when the need arose. In those two lines, you could already see the nature of the place: everyone doing twojobs,everyonemakingdo, everyone pitching in.
Even the barber shop arrived with a story before it ever opened its door.
The Madill Record could not resist printing it under the headline: “Barber Shop at Little City Has Plenty of Shade.” The paper reported, with a wink, that “Little City may have a crooked alley but its barber shop will be in the shade.”
The story, as told, went something like this.
A barber moving his building from Cartwright showed Paul Little, the real estate salesman at Little City, the exact spot he wanted—right beneath a shade tree. Paul made the deal. Only after the transaction was complete did he discover the chosen location sat squarely in an alley.
What to do? Reuel Little, Paul’s older brother and boss, offered the solution that only a boom townwouldconsiderperfectly reasonable: “Just run the alley around the shop.”
In that exchange, you see the town thinking on its feet. Streets, lots, alleys, and buildings were still flexible things, capable of being bent to fit the needs of whoever showed up ready to work. Shade for a barber mattered more than a straight alley. Order could come later. For now, usefulness ruled.
And so, in the same breath that Andy recorded houses filling and cafés opening, a barber shop that would sit under a tree, an alley that would politely detour around it, and a pair of brothers who understood that in Little City, practicality would always outrun formality.
A few days earlier, on July 21, Mr. and Mrs. F. L. Webb had opened another café. Mr. Webb, Andy reported, said business was good. Melba Hamblin worked behind the counter there. On July 26, Oldham Woods’ Palace Grocery opened its doors, run by Anderson Massingill and his mother, Mrs. Druscilla Massingill, who did not merely operate the store—they lived there.
It was all exactly what a town like this grows first: places to eat, a place to buy food, a few determined families, and the quiet understanding that if people were arriving, someone needed to feed them.
Through Andy’s eyes, Little City did not appear as a plan on paper or a headline in the Madill Record. It appeared asahandfulofhouses, acaféthatsmelledlikegrease and coffee, a grocery with its owners sleeping in the back, and a first family settling in under a brand-new roof while the field hummed just beyond town.
It was the sound of a town learning its own name. And then, almost immediately, the familiar outline of a boom town began to fill in around it. Andy’s next lines sketched the kind of growth that happens not by proclamation, but by hammer and nail. Joe Isbell was already at work building a dance hall, measured precisely at 28 by 50 feet. E. C. Butler and P. T. Lamberts of Ringling were putting up a pool hall. Mack C. Easter, identified plainly as a Bochito lumber man, had been enlarging his lumber yard to keep up with the sudden demand for boards, studs, and shingles. And a new office for Mayor Pete Winberrywouldbecompleted by the first of August.
But it was in this same entry that the Madill Record preserved the sort of detail that sounds small until you realize it is exactly how towns remember themselves. Andy wrote that Mayor Winberry bought the first hamburger ever sold in Little City. And he also bought the first item of groceries at the Palace. No proclamation could have said more.
The industrial backbone of the place was visible, too. Harris Concrete Company had stationed itself in town with three trucks and two men.Thetrucks,Andy noted, were Fords. The men were Johnnie Harris and Jack Frants. And in the dry humor that only appears when a place is still new enough for everyone to know everyone else, Andy added: Johnnie said he had one wife. Jack said he had none. You could feel the town smiling at itself.
He mentioned Paul Little working in real estate, “a busy man sometimes,” a phrase that said more than numbers ever could. And then the letter closed with a line that might be the most perfect boom-town sentence ever printed in the Madill Record: If you are out in Little City and see something with long legs running through the grass carrying a stick, please don’t shoot. It might be WarrenCarpenterdelivering lumber. Mack Easter, Andy explained, was having a new house built for Carpenter right behind the store.
In those few lines, Little City ceased to be an oil-field appendage. It became a place where men hauled boards through tall grass, where hamburgers marked history, where trucks and jokes and houses and dance halls all rose at once. It was still only weeks old. But it already had stories.
And on that same date— August 1, 1940—the Madill Record did something telling. It stepped back from Andy Massingill’s neighborly dispatches andplacedLittleCity into a much larger frame. Under the headline “BOOM TOWNS ARE ROMANTIC,” the paper wrote an editorial that matters not for what it predicted, but for how it understood what was happening in real time.
The editorial began with a sentence that could have served as the state’s unofficial motto: Oklahoma’s history is largely the history of boom towns. Some of those towns, it said, had gone on to become cities. Others had “withered and died.” Oil discoveries, the paper reminded its readers, had brought about the establishment of “many other boom towns,” and every one of them carried “a spirit of hope and adventure that is in the blood of the average Oklahoman.”
Then came the line that explained Little City better than any survey map or plat description ever could. People went to boom towns, the editorial insisted, because they believed “from the very bottom of [their] heart” that the town was going to succeed. Those who had no hope for the future did not go to bald spots on the prairie to build houses and stores. Boom towns, the paper said, were places of hope, industry, camaraderie, and an outlook unmarred by “errors of the past.” There was nothing there yet to regret. Nothing to weigh a place down. Only forward motion.
And then the editorial named it outright. Little City was identified plainly as “Marshall county’s new oil field town.” The paper noted that only weeks earlier it had been called Pure City, and that the name had already changed. It observed that new houses were being built, new families were moving in, new businesses were opening, and that happiness seemed to be the prevailing condition of the place.
The houses, it said, were of the “shotgun” type. The businesseswereexactlywhat one would expect: a grocery store, a café, a pool hall, and a honky-tonk—“thoroughly typical of a boom town.” Therewouldbemorestores,it added, and more houses, the number depending entirely upon the immediate needs created by development of the oil field.
And then the editorial closed with a sentence that was honest enough to be almost tender. Boom towns, it said, have a romantic appeal that somehow makes even gray-haired men want to moveinand“growupwiththe town.” Even if it is an oil boom town “that isn’t calculated to exist but a few years.”
It was an unsentimental truth wrapped in affection. The Madill Record understood something in August of 1940 that many towns never understand about themselves until it is too late: Little City was not merely being built. It was already being remembered.
A week later, the town spoke again. In the Madill Record dated August 8, 1940, AndyMassingillwrotefroma place that was still introducing itself to the world under the dateline: “Little City, Okla. August 4, 1940.” And what he described was not excitement, but momentum.
He reported that the past weekhadseena“goodamount of building,” the phrase suggesting steady hands rather than sudden spectacle. Reuel Street—already identified as the highway to Madill—had been plowed and smoothed, and gravel was expected soon. Even before the gravel arrived, the road was being prepared to carry the weight of what was coming.
Marvin Farmer, Andy wrote, was building a 26 x 50-foot “cot house” on Main Street, nearly finished. Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Churchwell had moved into one of Reuel Little’s new rent houses on Quintin Street. Mr. and Mrs. Warren Carpenter had moved into M. C. Easter’s house on Main Street. And, almost as if to reassure readers that this was no runaway development, he added that Mr.andMrs.ReuelLittlehad “just drove into town,” and that folks saw them often.
The founders were present. Watching. Walking the streets of the thing they had laid out on paper only weeks before. Business, he said, was improving daily. Jim Adams was installing gasoline pumps in front of his café—proof that traffic was already heavy enough to justify them. Scrue Driver had “really gone to work” for Harris Concrete. And then Andy slipped in the sort of line only a boom-town correspondent could write with a straight face: for the benefit of a “pretty little Madill girl,” Jack Frantz was back in town.
Marvin Cox, he reported, had moved his barber shop under the only pecan tree in town—a sentence that says more about Little City’s infancy than any census ever could. He named the visitors as though taking attendance at a family reunion: Mrs. C. E. Junkins, Miss Altha Lou Junkins, Miss Juanita Jordan, and Haskell Ashlock. In the same teasing tone, he noted that Miss Willie Mae Harper had been drinking soda pop.
He listed the workers: Buevene Stanley in Adams’ café, Eva Ruby Roberts working there as well. He praised Mayor Pete Winberry in language that reads like frontier poetry, saying he would do anything for anybody he was big enough to do, and that he “doesn’t weigh on hand scales.” Vera Griswold was working at the Webb café. Jack Carlton and JuneWatkinshadbeenmaking pictures in town Sunday afternoon.
What emerges from the report is not merely a list of activities. It is the sound of a town beginning to recognize its own routine—roads being smoothed, houses filling, gasoline pumps going in, barbers setting up under trees, founders driving through, and neighbors watching one another with the affectionate scrutiny of people who know they are all in this together.
And by August 15, 1940— datelined August 11—Little Citywasmeasuringitsfuture in something as simple, and as monumental, as light.
Andy Massingill wrote that the town “won’t be in the darkness much longer.” In fact, he expected electric lights by the time the paper came out, and he captured the mood of a place still being assembled by sentence and nail: lately, he said, everyone had been dating everything by “when we get electricity.” The words are almost tender. A town without streetlights is not merely inconvenient—it is unfinished. And Little City was tired of being unfinished.
He reported that the OG&E. company had been setting poles in town and that part of the wires were up. Utilities were moving from promise to presence. In the same entry, he noted that Jim Adams had moved his restaurant building over on the east side of his lot and had built a service station on the corner—not simply adding another business but shifting the layout of his little corner of town as though he could already see traffic patterns forming before the town had even fully formed itself.
Then Massingill recorded an early chapter of Little City’s most unforgettable civicimprovisation—thekind of thing that only happens in places born quickly and determinedly.
The Madill Record carried the headline: “Little City to Get Emergency Hospital.”
It reported that an emergency hospital for Little City was being planned by Dr. Walter Hardy of Ardmore, whothatweekhadpurchased a100x100-footlotfromReuel W. Little. Hardy had already made arrangements to have a 72-foot Pullman car moved to Little City on Thursday by J. E. Cheatham of Seminole, a man in the house-and-tank moving business. Cheatham explained that transporting the car would be a 96-foot moving job. Once it was placed on the truck, the load would weigh some 50,000 pounds.
The paper added that the Pullman car hospital would be operated locally by Dr. E. S. Emil.
And Massingill, writing from the ground where it was happening, gave the detail that makes the whole scene visible. He told readers that Dr. Hardy had moved a baggage and express car to Little City toserveasanemergency hospital, and he measured it as a man standing beside it would: it was “about 75 feet long.”
A hospital not built of brick or stone but hauled in on wheels and set down on the prairie like a declaration. We intend to live here long enough to need this.
He reported that Frank Hester had bought a lot on Quintin Street and planned to build a laundry there. He reported Mr. and Mrs. Johnnie Harris moving in on Thursday from St. Louis— not a neighboring community, but a far-off city, the kind of move that signals that oil country was pulling people from real distance now.
He wrote of Jack Frantz going to Cement on Thursday and coming back Friday looking sleepy, and of Scrue Driver Wilson going to Maud Friday to see his father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wilson. The report keeps doing what good boom-town writing always does: it turns an oil-field settlement into a human place by naming the mothers and fathers behind the men.
He noted that Hugh Churchwell was the superintendent of the water works in Little City—an important line, because it tells you the town was already appointing responsibility, already turning necessities into systems. He listed Sonny Boy Stanley working in Adams’ café. He named visitors from Madill. He noted dental work and repeated dentist visits with that same dry humor that runs through all these dispatches, joking that Little City folks were going to have good teeth or no teeth.
He observed Mack Easter making a lot of smoke in his part of town—an image that can mean a dozen things in a boom settlement, from sawdusttoweldingtohurried construction, but in any case it meant activity.
Massingill then recorded more arrivals: Mr. and Mrs. Ray Helms and son, Bobbie, moving into Mrs. M. A. Finney’s house on Quintin Street, and he noted plainly that Helms was working for the Pure Oil company—the tether that explains everything. Then he recorded one of those Little City moments that reads like a stage direction: Mr. and Mrs. Jearl Herndon and children, and Miss Estel Herndon, all of Madill, were in town Saturday night, and they had a portable radio. When the music started, Massingill wrote, Scrue Driver started. And then—like a wink to the editor and the reader alike— “Nuff said!”
He noted Mr. and Mrs. Paul Little and Mr. and Mrs. Nelson of Oklahoma City visitingSunday,andhemade sure the paper understood what that meant: it was Mrs. Little’s and the Nelsons’ first trip to Little City. The founders weren’t just selling lots; they were bringing people to look, to see, to imagine themselves there.
He noted Mrs. Oldham Woods and Mrs. J. E. (Blackie) Manning visiting Sunday. He noted Mr. and Mrs. E. L. Epperly from Seminole in town one day that week, looking for a location to move five dwelling houses, and he wrote—already speaking like a town spokesman— that they hoped to see them moving in soon. He recorded that Mrs. Webb had flowers blooming that she had put out since she came to Little City, a domestic detail that matters because it signals intention: you don’t plant flowers if you think you’ll be gone in a week.
He noted Warren Carpenter putting ducking around his sleeping porch “today,” with Mrs. Carpenter watching thejobwelldone—asmall scene, but it reads like permanence being stitched into place with fabric and nails.
Massingill closed that August report with the kind of number boom towns cherish because it is proof you can see without a census: twenty-five cars in town at one time that afternoon. “We are getting big fast.” In Little City,growthwasnotyetmeasured by population charts or incorporation papers. It was measured by headlights, traffic, and the simple fact that the darkness was about to lose its claim on the streets.
By late August, Little City was no longer a sketch on paper or a hopeful arrangement of boards and dust. It had begun counting itself. Counting houses. Counting lots. Counting shops.
In the Madill Record dated August 29, 1940—datelined August 25—Andy Massingill wrote with the satisfied tone of someone watching a wager pay off. You could tell they were growing, he said. Lots were selling like hot-cakes. And Little City now had seventeen dwelling houses.
He reported that Mrs. Alice DixonofAsherhadbought the land office building and was moving her beauty shop out to Little City, adding with comic certainty, “We will all get our hair curled.” A beauty shop, in an oil town barely a month old, is a sign that the place has already decided it intends to be more than temporary.
He noted that Mr. Little wasbuildinganewofficewest of the old one, and that the new office would have living quarters connected. Mr. and Mrs. Bill Brock would live there. And in the same line, he quietly recorded one of the first hints that Little City was beginning to organize itself: Mrs. Leta Mae Brock would serve as city secretary, collecting water bills and rent. The town was already billing itself.
He reported that Mr. and Mrs. C. M. Powell were building a 14 x 34-foot house on Main Street to serve homestyle meals. He noted Allan Davis cooking for Bishop Café. He reported that Paul Sanders of Enid was now barbering in Mr. Cox’s barber shop.
Then came the line that could have been written about a dozen Oklahoma oil towns at their loudest moment: Wednesday night they had a free dance, barbecue, and beer. More than a thousand people were in town. “We were really on a boom.”
Massingill recorded the small movements that make the place human: Mrs. Johnnie HarrisgoingtoBlanchard to see her mother; Pete Roberts being transferred from Cement to work for Harris Concrete; Bobbie Helms being described as “a man around town”; and Jack Pistolo spending most of his time fishing, though, Massingill observed, he never seemed to have any fish to eat. “The big ones must all get away.”
He noted visitors from Seminole, Oilton, and the Brocks. He recorded Mrs. Carpenter visiting her sister in Madill. He noted a trip to Denison, Texas by Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Fox and Mr. and Mrs. Ray Helms, with Roy Helms also making the trip. He wrote of Mr. and Mrs. Bill McCuan and son Gale visiting. And he recorded a detail that quietly mattered for winter and permanence alike: Charles Vanderpool was putting in a butane system.
By the end of August 1940, Little City was no longer introducing itself. It was beginning to behave like a place that assumed it would still be here next month. And the boom kept adding its basic essentials—electricity, meat cases, ice cream, and the steady reshaping of businesses as they matured from rough openings into settled fixtures.
A separate Little City letter datelined “Little City, Okla. August 18, 1940” reported that business was improving daily. Mayor Pete Winberry and Paul Little were selling lots. Two new houses had been built that very week. Families were moving into Mrs. M. A. Finney’s houses on Quintin Street—Mr. and Mrs. R. B. Pistolo and son Jack, and Mr. and Mrs. F. B. Fox—and the detail that mattered most was quietly included: both men worked for Pure Oil. The field and the town were still tied by the same thread.
Visitors came and went, as they always did in boom townswherecuriosityandopportunity traveled together. But then Massingill recorded a milestone that, in 1940 rural Oklahoma, marked the line between temporary and modern: Palace Grocery installed a meat case and an ice cream cabinet. And he added the sentence that explains, better than any historian could, what electricity meant to a prairie oil town: “Since we got electricity out here, we can have lots of things.” Ice cream. Fresh meat. Light after dark. These were not luxuries. They were signals that Little City was stepping into permanence.
Massingill noted that Ray Lemmond had rented Joe Isbell’s dance hall and opened with a big dance Saturday night, with Eugene Daniels working there. The dance hall was no longer a frame building waiting for a crowd; it had found one.
He recorded that Miss Millie Bishop purchased the 25 x 10-foot lot and café formerly owned by Jim Adams and was now operating it as “Bishop’sCafé.”Andhemade sure readers knew who she was: the daughter of Jeff A. Bishop, a lifelong resident of Madill. That detail anchored the boom to the county’s older roots. This was not just outsiders chasing oil. Marshall Countypeoplewereinvesting themselves in the place.
And then, because boom towns never forget to laugh at themselves, he preserved the kind of social detail that towns carry in memory far longer than drilling reports: M. C. Easter and Jim Adams were caught letting the air out of Mayor Winberry’s tires on Sunday.
That small line, printed without ceremony, says as much about Little City as any drilling report ever could. The town was no longer a novelty. It had reached the point where its people had time to tease one another.
By the close of 1940, Little City no longer felt like a place that had sprung up beside an oil camp. It felt like a town that had learned how to live with itself. Utilities were in place. Businesses had matured. Families knew one another by name. The barber shop, the cafés, the grocery, the dance hall, the service station, the hospital in the Pullman car—all of it worked together in the quiet, unremarkable way that marks a communitynolongerproving it exists, but simply existing.
What had begun in April as survey stakes in open pasture had, by year’s end, become routine, laughter, pranks, church suppers, and children with ice cream on their faces under new electric lights. Little City had crossed the invisible line between boom town and home.
In Part III, the oil field keeps producing—but Little City begins to discover what it means to endure beyond the boom.