Lynn County Tex

Fort Worth: Standard Blue Print Map and Engineering Company, 1930. Very good.. Blueline map, 33.75 x 32 inches. Original folds, moderate edge wear, short closed tear into part of title, ink stamp in upper left corner. A large blueprint plat map of Lynn County, Texas, located in west Texas just south of Lubbock. Webb County's most notable city is its county seat, Tahoka. The present map was produced by the Standard Blue Print Map and Engineering Company in Fort Worth for H.N. Harris, an oil speculator working across Texas and Oklahoma in the first half of the 20th century. The map depicts Lynn County divided into hundreds of individual plots of land, (truncated) most of which appears to be owned by various railroad companies. Some of the land is also noted as belonging to other individually-named owners, some is designated as school land, or is wholly unclaimed. Interestingly, the legend of the map includes just six descriptors: location, drilling, producing, gas well, dry hole, and abandoned wells. All of these terms relate to energy production, are keyed to various points on the map, and would have been useful to speculators of the period.

A large section in the middle of the map is outlined in yellow pencil and designated by a manuscript note as belonging to Hart Oil Corporation. The company was formed in the early-1900s when oil was discovered on the Hart Ranch in Palo Pinto County. The company then expanded across Texas, acquiring land for oil and gas exploration. The present map does not appear in OCLC. (Inventory #: 5826)