New London School: In Memoriam, March 18, 1937, 3

17 P.M.

Lori Olson

• Publisher: Eakin Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781681792033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The date was March 18, 1937. Just minutes before the dismissal bell rang at London School in tiny East Texas boomtown of New London, something shocking happened: a deadly natural gas explosion destroyed the school and brought the oil-rich community to its knees. Nearly 300 students, teachers, and visitors - an entire generation of East Texans - were killed.

Those who survived and those who worked tirelessly in the debris to find the dead and injured were forever changed. Because their memories were so painful, the intimate details of the worst disaster in American history were silenced for decades.

"New London School in Memoriam" begins before the discovery of oil in Rusk County in 1930, chronicles the growth of the "Richest School in America, " then leads the reader through the events of that tragic Thursday. The aftermath is examined through historic documents, archived photos, and firsthand accounts. For the first time since 1937 the tragedy is revisited as a lasting tribute to the remarkable children, men, and women of New London and the East Texas oil fields.

CHAPTER ONE

“Mineral Blessings”

Change was in the air in Rusk County, Texas, when wildcatter Marion “Dad’ Joiner went hunting for black gold with Daisy Bradford No. 3. It was 1930, and the possibility that oil just might be found under the dry red dirt of East Texas provided the one glimmer of hope in what was the darkest night of the Great Depression.

Years later, soon-to-be oil magnate H. L. Hunt recalled that fateful day. “I was at the well site on Friday, September 5, 1930, when the drill stem test was run on the Joiner well. When the tool was run in the hole and opened, oil blew through the top of the derrick, and I was confident that the well would be a producer.” A month later, the well’s casing was run and the well was swabbed. A rich column of oil shot over the top of the crown block on the derrick of Joiner’s Daisy Bradford No. 3. “[It] turned out to be the Discovery Well of the great East Texas field. The drill stem test . . . did not cause the major oil companies to get very excited, but the greatest oil boom in history was on, whether or not we all recognized it at the moment.”

Within days, unemployed men looking to prepare drill sites, build rigs and tanks, drill wells, and lay pipes in the richest oil field ever discovered had flocked to East Texas. On any given day, as many as four hundred of them might show up looking for work, and recently quiet Rusk County was quiet no more.

Private residences became temporary boarding houses, renting out beds and cots in any available space. Shotgun houses and tent cities with names like Turnertown and Sweeneyville sprang up seemingly overnight along the sides of gravel roads as the newly employed put down tentative roots. Service stations and cafeterias and food markets were quickly erected to provide basic necessities, and the gravel roads and two-wheel tracks leading out to the oil field became rush-hour highways clogged by bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Local landowners who would have been out picking cotton and attending to the fall harvest were instead waiting in line at the county courthouse in Henderson to cash in on the black bonanza. More than twelve hundred legal instruments pertaining to leases and royalties were filed with the county clerk during the first week of the boom alone, and it was estimated that within that same period, Rusk County people had received at least a half a million dollars as payment for leases and royalties.

With the influx of both people and money, the communities of Rusk County were forced to change, and in no community was that change more evident than the unincorporated village of London.

Established as a frontier post office in 1855, London was a quiet East Texas farming community. Within five years, a school was formed, educating both day students and boarders from throughout the region, and it quickly became the pride of the community. In August 1875, the Texas Legislature created the state’s public school system, and the need for private academies and boarding schools such as the one in London declined.

A new school with twenty-eight students and one teacher was chartered in August of 1877, and the legacy of public education in London was established. By 1900 the school had expanded into a white, wooden, two-story, four-room schoolhouse featuring a second-floor auditorium and a belfry, and five years later, enrollment had grown to seventy students.

And so it continued through the next two decades, with school enrollment increasing as new farm families moved into the district, and decreasing as many of those same families were forced by low crop prices and drought to find a living elsewhere.

When the Daisy Bradford No. 3 came in on that fall day in 1930, London boasted a hundred homes, a handful of stores, and a school population of nearly one hundred students in ten grades of study.

Humble Oil and Refining Company purchased a tract of land just north of London along the Henderson & Overton Railroad on Farm to Market Road 1513 and established a new headquarters and company camp. Within weeks, more than two dozen family homes had been built, along with a recreation hall featuring cooking and canning facilities, a mess hall, and five bunkhouses for single oil-field workers. One hundred families were relocated from the fields of Corsicana, Texas, alone, and the oil-patch community of New London was born.

By the time school started later that fall, New London had grown to more than a thousand, and the school’s population had exploded. Just one year earlier, there had been a hundred students in the entire school; now there were eighty-five students in the first grade alone. There weren’t enough teachers, supplies, desks, or even books for the new students. Residents of the school district quickly raised a new wooden frame building behind the London School and christened it the Old London Ward School. A similar schoolhouse was constructed on property closer to the Humble camp and named the New London Ward School. Together the two new schools would form the London Independent School District, a district that encompassed roughly thirty square miles and had an assessed value of sixteen million dollars.

In 1932 a Tyler architectural firm led by Marvin DeFee and Emory White was contracted to draw up plans for what would come to be called “The Richest School In America,” a thousand-student junior and senior high-school building. Wealth created by oil made it possible for the new $350,000 facility on a red clay hill midway between New London and Old London to have the best of everything: a schoolwide intercom system; hardwood floors; separate hands-on workrooms for stenography, chemistry, and manual training; and even a two-story auditorium and stage complete with balcony seating.

Expectations and enrollment continued to increase, and the London School campus continued to grow. A wooden gymnasium building was added late in 1932, just east of the main high school, and by the start of the 1933 school year, room had been made for cooking, sewing, industrial art, and vocational agriculture classes as well. By 1934 the school had earned accreditation in twenty-one academic areas, and it was decided that additional classroom space was in order. Two six-room, two-story wings were added to the main building, giving what folks simply called “the high school” an overall shape similar to a large letter E. The completed building contained more than two dozen rooms and encompassed over 30,000 square feet of space, 254 feet north to south, bisected by the two-story auditorium, with 140-foot wings stretching back to the east at each end.

And the campus kept growing. Bleachers and what may have been the first outdoor stadium lights in East Texas were added to a new athletic field later in 1934, and on the first day of school 1935, elementary students walked through the double wooden doors of a new $45,000 brick elementary building that had been built just north of the high school and replaced the two Ward schools which had been there since 1931. That same year, three separate high-school facilities were added, including a home-economics cottage, a frame music building, and a brick cafeteria. The campus was complete.

Consolidation with Jacobs Common School District #26 and Bunker Hill Common School District #24 in October of 1935 boosted that year’s enrollment to an all-time high of 1,432.

An estimated 1,200 students were enrolled in the London School at the start of the 1936–37 school year. Of those, it’s believed that 465 were registered in the primary grades, another 425 in the inermediate grades, and an additional 310 in the high school. The two-year-old elementary building was already bursting at the seams with students, and so it was decided that three fifth-grade classrooms would be moved into available space in the junior high school’s south wing.

Historically accurate enrollment figures for March 18, 1937, are nearly impossible to reconstruct. Many of the students registered at London School at the start of the school year were in some way associated with the surrounding oil fields and moved in or out of the district during the year. Records that might have provided some insight had been stored in school offices, and were destroyed when the building exploded.

Life at London School was good. Students were offered opportunities nearly unheard-of outside of the rich East Texas oil field in 1937. Students in manual-training, home-economics, and chemistry classes had access to state-of-the-art tools and technologies, and other students were able to work with new office equipment, read the latest books, and perform on a stage with long velvet curtains. The Wildcat Marching Band traveled by trailer bus, performing throughout the region, and notable musicians came to the music building to teach students advanced techniques and to conduct special concerts in the 750-seat auditorium.

The March 18, 1937, edition of the high school’s newspaper, The London Times, provides invaluable insight into the atmosphere of abundance evident at the school:

BAND TO GIVE FIRST SPRING CONCERT

The band is working hard and preparing for their first spring concert to be given Thursday night at 7:45, March 25. We will have Mr. Vandercook. Mr. Vandercook will conduct one of his own compositions, and also the State Class B number, The Dofnus Overture, which was written by GE Holmes, a member of Mr. Vandercook’s faculty in Chicago. We hope to have the largest crowd ever to hear a band concert in East Texas, as we feel we are indeed fortunate in securing the service of Mr. Vandercook.

As was the case in so many East Texas districts, athletics were of paramount importance at London School, and no team was more revered than the Wildcat football squad, who, according to the school newspaper, was already preparing for spring training: “Coaches Moore and Waller are expecting a large number of candidates out for the workout next Monday afternoon. There will be several letterman out there to help the coaches do what they learned in their recent visit to Dallas.”

Each spring, an event called the County Meet captured the attention and school spirit of both the community and the student body. In 1937 the daylong interscholastic competition in everything from spelling and typing to foot races and baseball had been scheduled to be held in nearby Henderson on Friday, March 19. To encourage student attendance, Superintendent C. W. Shaw had canceled that day’s classes, stating, “There will be no school Friday. Every school pupil is urged to be present to back our school in every way possible. If Mr. Shaw thinks this event is important enough to turn out school, we should certainly lend our moral support by attending as many of these events as possible. London is represented this year by more members than ever before, and more interest is being shown by every one.”

Not everything in the school paper was hard-hitting news, however. Like countless student publications before and since, The London Times shed light on the intricate, and often intriguing, world of teenagers, as seen in the recurring column titled simply, “We Wonder:”

Why Virginia Rose is proud of her brother?

Who thought Paul was so cute when he was all dressed up for the play last Wednesday?

What has become of the romance between Jack and Correne?

Why Yvonne wanted to be in the band?

By all accounts, the day that would catapult the London School into history started out like so many other East Texas days. The sun rose in the east, and by midday temperatures had reached a beautiful 70 degrees. Younger students played White Elephant and Red Rover before school, and older students gathered in small tuck-aways after lunch to gossip about friends, strategize plans for the long weekend, and laugh. Teams were pract...