Oil Field Camp Wives and Mothers
(Continued From Last Week)
Alice McKnight Long: Teterville Camp Six miles west of the Burkett camp, up in the Flint Hills was an oil camp called Teterville. It was a scattered community of family dwellings, oil field buildings, and a store on the Teter pasture lease. Alice Long, former librarian at the Eureka Library, lived at Teterville during the 1920s. Her father was “farm boss,” in charge of all the work on the lease. Some of her childhood experiences and impressions follow: “Whatever was on Teter land was called Teterville. There was another camp about a half mile west of us. The store was probably a half mile north of us, and the was a row of houses down the hill from the store. The Empire camp was about a mile or more from our house. The area was developing more all the time.”
This was about 1920. “My mother had died and we had been living with an aunt and uncle in Oklahoma. My daddy decided he wanted all of us together again so he hired a housekeeper, an elderly lady from Matfield Green. I was three at the time. My daddy met and married my stepmother, who was cooking in a boardinghouse.”
“We did not have any trees. We could see the creek about five miles east of us and there were trees there. When we first lived in Teterville, we lived in one of the shotgun houses. And that’s where we were living when mother (Alice’s stepmother) and daddy were married. We did not live there long. Mother had a daughter, so that made four children. We moved once into a larger house and had Christmas there. Then we moved into one of the nicer houses, a lease house. This one had a screened porch, front bedroom, and a living room, a dining room, of all things and a kitchen. Then it had what we called a playroom and it had us kids’ beds and toys.”
“And in the kitchen, someone, had installed an old wood range with gas burners in it. Well, I thought it was a wonderful thing, you didn’t have to carry wood; you didn’t have to carry out ashes and so forth.”
“One time mother was washing daddy’s clothes and had the boiler on the stove and the grease (from the clothes) boiled out onto the stove and caught fire and burned mother’s face and she started out the back door. Daddy came in and caught her, put the fire out, brought her to town and she got along all right. She always laughed and said, ‘Well, that was one way to get rid of freckles.’” “We were lucky in that we had a cistern, and if it rained, we didn’t have to haul water. And if it didn’t rain, everybody hauled water from a big spring that was west of Teterville. It was good water, and we took milk cans and hauled water. We also had a washhouse, which was something special out there.”
“My brother Laverne was always talking me into doing something foolish. We had just heard about parachutes and he talked me into going up on the roof of the washhouse with mother’s umbrella and jumping off. Luckily it wasn’t very high. We walked to school, probably a mile and a quarter. We went across the pastures and hit all the wells and so forth and went in all the engine houses and got warm, waded all the deep snow drifts.”
“We had a swing set made of pipe and two teetertotters built on the pipe. That was our shady place to play. And we didn’t have a sandpile, but we had soft dirt which made lovely roads.”
“The first year we went to school, the schoolhouse was over towards the Empire camp and it was a one-room school. Then they moved the schoolhouse over east, on top of he hill, and added onto it. And it became a two-room school. That was my third grade. We had already come to town (Eureka) when I was in the second grade. Daddy had decided we didn’t learn much in first grade, so he moved mother and we kids to town. We went to Random School; it was the second year that it was open. Then we moved back out to the country the next year because daddy had developed ulcers batching. The two-room was much nicer than the little one-room school had been. We had a lot more kids by then. A lot of them coming from away up north, Shambaugh, (oil field along the Greenwood/ Chase County line) and those other leases.”
Teterville was about twenty-three miles from Eureka and Alice remembers that as part of her father’s duties, he had to make daily trips to Eureka and back with “time and gauges.” The roads were “terrible.” Before rock crushers were in use in the county, river gravel was used on the road between Teterville and Eureka. The hard and sharp Flint Hills gravel took its toll on vehicles.
She spoke of the wooden derricks used in the early years by the oil industry: “When I was there, everything had wooden derrick, every well had a wooden derrick. You could see where all the wells were. There was one close to the house, made a lot of noise. I don’t remember the noise bothering us, but anytime at night it stopped, it woke you up.”
Like most oil field families, Alice’s family heated their house with natural gas supplied by the company. She remembers that the colder the weather, the less gas pressure there was for heating. She recalled that a time or two, she stayed in bed all day to keep warm.
By the late 1950s, oil field camps were being broken up as oil production declined and oil companies closed down certain fields and operations. The better company homes were sold to individuals for homes. Some to towns and others to farms or ranch sites.
Employees moved to town, driving back and forth to the oil fields, others found housing for their families near the leases by renting empty farm houses. Others employees moved to farms they had bought or rented acreages to combine their oil field work with farming or ranching.
Two of the women interviewed left the oil field camp life in the 1950s when the camps were closed. The third left in the 1930s when she went away to college and, later taught school in Greenwood County. Essie Dunham moved to Madison and did professional hand quilting and art. After the Beeman’s sold their store in 1937, they combined farming with Vonie’s work as a pumper. They lived near Willow Valley, where they had the family farm. Alice Long worked for twenty-two years at the Eureka Carnegie Library and retired in 1981 as head librarian.
Little remains today of one-time family life in the oil field camps besides stories, memories and pictures. Today, they are the ghost camps of Greenwood County.
