The information below was copied directly from the book titled GLADEWATER TEXAS 1873-1973, edited by Nauty Byrd Mayer, Elizabeth Moore Osteen, and Mildred Wood Barker, published by Gladewater Mirror, Gladewater, 1973.  A copy of this book may be found in The Gladewater Museum.

"In 1930, the country was in the throes of the Great Depression and money was scarce.  The weather was miserable, hot and dry, dust was choking and crops were wilting.  Enthusiasm is hard to generate when all the conversation is about hard times.  The only relief from the monotony was the drilling in Rusk County.

“Dad” Joiner was the wildcatter the farmers and businessmen put their faith in all during the hot dry summer.  His equipment was old and broken down, and he had run out of money innumerable times during the three years of drilling on the Bradford farm.  This was his third try in a shoe string operation—anyone with sense would have given up long before.

When he cored in the Woodbine on September 5, 1930, it was saturated with oil.  The word spread and huge crowds flocked to see a gusher blow in.  Sunday, October 5, 1930, was a great day for a picnic.  Thousands choked the dusty roads in cars, trucks, wagons, buggies, on horseback and on foot.  Near sundown, the earth began to tremble; there was a gurgling sound and then a mighty roar.  The crowd went wild as the oil blew over the crown block.

The next day it began to rain; a really gully washer of a rain.  Splashing sheets of water broke the drought, and the gushing fountain of oil broke the depression in East Texas"

"Up until the “greatest boom this country had ever seen”, Gladewater had been a small farming community with a population of around 500. However, the discovery of oil in East Texas, the population grew almost overnight to 10,000.  “They all came—oil men, merchants, lawyers, doctors, carpenters, lease-hounds, roustabouts, teamsters, roughnecks, clerks, teachers, stenographers, cooks, laborers, adventurers, gamblers, thieves, crooks, opportunists, prostitutes, swindlers, drifters, all needing and wanting to make a fortune or at least a living.  Whatever they wanted, there was more opportunity here than they had left at home.  Some were following trades and professions of their former lives, some were instant experts in new endeavors.  There were some well-educated, some illiterate.  All were energetic.

Virtually every spare room in the small community was for rent.  Practical housewives were curtaining off parlors and dining rooms.  Some were renting times to use beds, but by April, when Snavely and the Coles wells were completed, everything was full.  The town was bulging, and then bursting at the seams.
They set up to live and work in tents, shacks, rented houses, rented rooms, under trees and in their cars.  Whole families came—the affluent and the destitute, some with only the clothes on their backs, others with boxes and barrels of silver, china and crystal.  There were all degrees, amounts and descriptions of  household furnishings and personal possessions.  Here where five hundred Gladeites lived one Christmas, eight thousand lived the next year.  It seemed that Santa Claus had come here to stay, but the rest of the country was sinking further into the doldrums.

Everywhere in Gladewater there was a frenzy of activity and lease was the name of the game.  Lease to drill and lease to build.  Build a house, a hotel, a floor for the tent.  Build a tourist court, a café, a jail.  Build a dance hall, a derrick a store.  Build a school room and a boardwalk.  Now, we need water.  Now, we need drains.  We need pavement.  We don’t need any more rain!  Cut the timber.  Run the sawmill.  Forget about planting the cotton and the corn.

Almost overnight, the more sparsely settled south end of town was crowded with new businesses—offices, stores, theaters, cafes, tourist courts and innumerable hotels.

The typical hotel was twenty to forty rooms on two floors with a center hall running the length of each.  The rooms were tiny cubicles holding a bed, chair and dresser.  These were usually single wall, board and batten structures.  Almost any skeleton key would open the flimsy locks.

The hastily constructed tourist courts were one to three room light housekeeping apartments which today would be considered pretty shabby even for a lake cabin.

A tent city sprang up in the north end of town as more and more families followed men who had found work.

People lived where they could with no apology or pretense.  In those days of bread lines, this section was better off than any other part of the country. National economists referred to the area as an economic white spot."