The Best Little Oil Well

The sleepy farm town of La Grange, Texas, has not had much to brag about since 1976, when a nosy investigative reporter helped close down the Chicken Ranch, the famous brothel celebrated in the Broadway musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. But now La Grange has a different kind of natural resource: "Chicken Ranch No. 1," an oil well that is producing 107 bbl. of low-sulfur crude a day.

The well is one of the more than 1,000 new discoveries in the so-called Austin chalk, a complex geological stratum that lies between Houston and Austin. Oilmen have long suspected that the area held many "sweet pots" of oil and natural gas, but they always lacked the incentive and technology to find them. Now better seismic analysis and the skyrocketing price of crude have made it profitable to search out smaller deposits. Hamlets in the area like Old Dime Box and La Grange have turned into boomtowns. In Giddings, the epicenter of the oilfield, houses that rented for $75 a month now go for $300, and one local entrepreneur is converting old oil-storage tanks into motel rooms renting for $20 a night. That is exactly what the girls at the old Chicken Ranch used to charge.

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