(A brief
history published in the first Annual
from Borger High School in 1928.
Author unknown.)
Borger may
be compared to a mushroom, which, it is said,
springs up over night. About four years ago the
land on which Borger is now located was an open,
grass-covered prairie; a cattle country. Not
more than a half a dozen people inhabited the
area now included in the Borger oil field. A
few years earlier, about 1897, the land of the
Borger region, about half of which was school
land, was offered for sale on easy terms at
about a dollar per acre. During earlier years
but one family, Mr. and Mrs. Billie Dixon, lived
in what is now Hutchinson County. They kept the
post office near historic Adobe Walls, the scene
of a famous battle between Indians and buffalo
hunters in 1874.
The plains
continued to be nearly uninhabited until one
morning the sun peeped over the horizon at a
growing city on the crest of Dixon Creek
canyon. The howling coyote was held at bay, and
the grassy prairie was changed into a
flourishing little city. The history of this
city and the men who made it reads like
fiction. The two men responsible for the city
were A. P. Borger and J. R. Miller. Mr. Borger
came to what is now Borger from Cromwell,
Oklahoma, in January 1926, to look over the land
in the view of establishing a town. He returned
to Oklahoma, but soon came back with J. R.
Miller and decided upon the proper location,
provided it could be purchased. After finding
the land belonged to Mr. J. F. Weatherly of
Panhandle, Texas, they persuaded the owner to
sell two hundred forty acres at the remarkable
price of fifty dollars an acre. This land was
immediately divided into lots and sold on March
8, 1926. The property which had been bought for
$12,000 was sold for several thousand dollars
profit. The town was named for the founder, Mr.
Borger. At this time there were from eighty to
one hundred new oil wells in northern Carson and
southern Hutchinson counties.
Within
ninety days after the town was located, the
population grew to thirty thousand. Many
undesirable people came to Borger, giving it the
name of the toughest city in the United States.
Borger consisted of shacks and tents sprawling
over the hills. There were people of every
description and from every state in the Union,
seeking riches, or adventure. The task of
organizing an incorporated town out of all these
gold seeking prospectors, with the evil and vice
that follows, was indeed a colossal one.
Some idea of the town in its early stages may be
gained from the following facts. All material
used in the oil field had to be hauled from
Panhandle, twenty-five miles away. Thousands of
trucks were used, running day and night. The
estimated population at the end of eight months
was 35,000. The townsite office was used for a
post office, a telephone office, and community
center. For days there was no post office. Mr.
Miller himself brought out the mail from
Panhandle for several weeks, and distributed it
at the townsite office. The one telephone line
was an extension from Pantex to a Panhandle
line. The first city hall, a structure about six
feet square, cost $1,200. In front of it was the
jail, a wooden shack, 14 feet X 30 feet, which
contained as many as eighty prisoners at one
time. Chains were used to shackle the unruly
inmates. |