Remembering Burbank, Osage county Oklahoma

http://youtu.be/nX1joQB_tf4
Burbank was established on the Eastern Oklahoma Railway in 1903 and was reportedly named for a cocklebur-covered area along nearby Salt Creek. The town's founder was Anthony "Gabe" Carlton, a mixed-blood Osage and a Chouteau family descendant, who owned the townsite. The Burbank post office opened inside the store of Ira McCorkle, the town's first postmaster, in December 1907. Burbank evolved as a farming and ranching community. Early businesses included two grain elevators, a boarding house, several stores, and a bank. The town had approximately two hundred residents when oil was struck north and east of town on May 8th, 1920. E. W. Marland (later Governor and US Congressman of Oklahoma) drilled that well. The second well was a heavy gas and light oil producer, with oil that would burn in an automobile. The third offset well was topped the day before Christmas. On New Year's Day, while the crew was on vacation, the well started flowing one barrel per minute with the tools still in the hole. The only tank available was a thousand-barrel wooden storage tank. A flow line was laid to it, and a wire was sent to Tulsa for help. By dark, trucks had delivered three-inch pipe, and by three o'clock the next morning a pipeline three miles long had been laid to adequate storage facilities. The flow from the well increased to a little over twenty-five hundred barrels per day. As a result, Burbank became a boom town and a center of oil field activity. The Burbank field produced more than thirty-one million barrels of oil in 1923. The Phillips Petroleum Company and the Sinclair Oil and Gas Company built large refineries near town. Hotels, grocery stores, lumberyards, and cafés served the legion of oil field workers, many of whom earned as much as eighteen dollars a day. The Burbank Tribune, the town's newspaper, was published starting in 1921. At the height of the boom Burbank's population was about three thousand. Among that number were bootleggers, gamblers, prostitutes, and other undesirables. Violence was commonplace. One account stated that the Burbank bank was robbed 15 times, including 3 times in one day. As a result, it was one of the first Banks in Oklahoma fitted with bullet proof glass. The bank building, and the glass, still stand. Burbank began declining with the end of the oil boom and the onset of the Great Depression. A large tornado struck the town (and many of the oil camps in the area) in 1936, destroying homes and businesses, many of which were never rebuilt. The town reverted to its agricultural roots steadily declining through the decades. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, purchaser of the Eastern Oklahoma Railway in 1907, stopped passenger service in the early 1940s and abandoned its line through Burbank in 1971. State highway 60, which once ran through Burbank, was relocated south of the town, further isolating it. The old school still stands and has an active alumni. Typical for small towns, the school lingered long past the towns heyday. The high school consolidated with nearby Shidler in the 1970s, but the grade school operated until 2002. The Buckeye theater building, the Burbank boarding house, built in 1921 still stand. The bank building is listed on the NRHP . The Burbank field gave start to many of the oil companies we know today, including Conoco (originally Marland Oil), Phillips Pertorleum, Skelly Oil, as well as Roxana, Carter Oil Company (later incorporated into Standard Oil), Gypsy (later Gulf Oil) . Oil leases in this area were obtained through the federally controlled Osage Indian Reservation auctions, which auctioned off 160-acre tracts and divided the proceeds equally among tribe members. Between 1912 and 1928 twenty-eight of these auctions sold a total of 700,000 acres,making the Osage Nation the most wealthy group of people per capita on the planet. Many of these auctions were conducted by Colonel E. Walters, of Skedee, Oklahoma, ironically, also a ghost town.


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