Midland

By James Collett and Doug Page

Midland was a young farming and ranching community on the southern edge of the Llano Estacado when the real-photo postcard era began near the opening of the 20th century. Businesses, residents, and promoters embraced this new technology to produce images capturing Midland's unusual rural-and-cosmopolitan mix. As postcards changed to linen and chrome, Midland also underwent dramatic changes. The city on the plains worked hard to become an indispensable part of the vast 1920s Permian Basin oil industry. In post-World War II years, Midland grew into an urban center of West Texas, positioned strategically at the midpoint of Interstate 20's path from Fort Worth to El Paso.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jan 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781439655535

James Collett

Historian James Collett has partnered with Doug Page, longtime Midland resident and collector of vintage Midland postcards, to create a multifaceted view of key eras in Midland's history. These vintage images from their collections and the Midland County Historical Museum archives preserve a unique look at yesterday's Midlanders.

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INTRODUCTION

At the turn of the 20th century, Midland was a young agricultural community located on the southern edge of a vast plateau known as the Llano Estacado. In those same years, federal law was enacted allowing the use of the words post card or postcard to be printed on the back of privately printed mailing cards. The undivided-back postcards produced by the likes of the Albertype Company and Detroit Publishing became a popular form of advertising, education, and entertainment in addition to their practical use as a form of correspondence. In 1907, the divided-back postcard was introduced, which permitted messages on the back along with the address. This type of card was hardly a year old when the City Drug Store offered images of Midland’s annual Fourth of July parade.

Postcards by their very nature are public artifacts. Created in multiple copies, they are a commercial entity, designed first to sell themselves to individual buyers. Beyond that, they hawk messages depicting particularly crafted versions of popular times and places. The postcards were used as tools of community boosters, and as such, their images and captions frequently paint reality with a rose-tinted brush.

Photographers in Midland supplied card manufacturers with a wealth of images, including special events like parades, everyday street traffic, public buildings, churches, homes, and scenes of ranch and farm life in the surrounding region. These cards display a bit of the exuberance and optimism of a young city at the beginning of the 20th century. They provide little evidence of the setbacks during those years, including smallpox, f lu epidemics, losses to a world war, or the farming boom busted by severe drought and economic depression. Even messages written on the postcards remain consistently pleasant. Some do comment on the vast, level, treeless terrain. Big country down here, one traveler remarked.

Beginning in the early 1920s, the dramatic growth in the automobile industry irrevocably altered the course of Midland history. Midlanders played their part in supporting a movement to develop the first system of interstate routes across the nation. Texas Highway 1 was planned to follow the Texarkana to El Paso path across the state. Texas communities like Midland helped build momentum for the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1916, popularly known as the Bankhead Bill in honor of its primary supporter, Sen. John Bankhead of Alabama. The road through Midland became a segment of the Bankhead Highway, planned as the nation’s first intercontinental route. This highway, running from Washington, DC, to San Diego, California, was more dream than reality in 1920, but that did not dissuade Midlanders from promoting the Broadway of America.

The rapid increase in motor-vehicle production and the switching of railroad engines to diesel launched a frenzied search for new petroleum resources. Beginning with the first discovery well in 1920, the seeking and developing of the immense petroleum resources beneath much of West Texas replaced agriculture as the driving economic force. One field of new wells quickly followed another, all within a 100-mile radius of Midland. New communities sprang up amidst the rigs and oil tanks as workers and families became pioneers on a new frontier, one defined by the subsurface layer of petroleum resources that comprise the Permian Basin.

Midland entrepreneurs realized their city lay near a strategic nucleus of this new geography and possessed attractive assets with their railroad connections and promotion of paved roads. Leveraging resources originally created in agriculture, city and county leaders launched a building campaign to provide office space for the diverse companies of the burgeoning oil industry. Many firms soon established Midland offices. Vast quantities of oil were stored and shipped from the city. This first era of rapid Permian Basin expansion survived into the Great Depression but slowed by 1935. As Midland-based companies helped define the parameters of an evolving industry, they also mitigated the Depression’s impact on West Texas.

The rise of automobile traffic also affected a new postcard era that began in the Great Depression years. Improved production processes allowed printers to produce high–rag content cards with a textured look, which came to be called linen. These cards, with beautiful color detail, could be quickly produced in volume. They offered a vibrant and somewhat idealized vision of American life that contrasted sharply with the darker reality of the Great Depression. They played a role in the growth of roadside culture, as restaurants, hotels, motels, service stations, and trailer parks sought to bring more tourists to their doors. Midland-area linen postcards appeared alongside real-photo cards. Both types depicted the emerging West Texas industries of tourism and oil fields, preserving images of Midland’s changing face during these years.

In the World War II era, postcards became scarce as the war effort demanded an increasing volume of resources, including paper. Tourism declined as men enlisted and military travel expanded. The greater need to protect information from assisting the enemy also curtailed what might be photographed and shared, and a postcard, with its highly visible photography and message, might now be deemed dangerous.

Midland played multiple roles in the war effort. Permian Basin oil was crucial to the success of this highly mechanized war. The Midland Army Air Force Bombardier Training School opened in 1942. Thousands of pilots and bombardiers trained there, using the Norden bombsite to practice striking targets drawn on the flat terrain. There were few postcards, only government-approved images of the base and its activities.

The petroleum industry grew dramatically in the postwar era, and Midland expanded along with it, erecting tall buildings visible for miles across the plains. The modern interstate system transformed the old Bankhead Highway into Interstate 20. Service industries such as motels, restaurants, and gasoline stations became standardized, and a new postcard form helped them maintain a bit of individuality. Photochrome postcards, developed in 1939, were first introduced by the Union Oil Company and stocked at their Western service stations. The color-photograph postcards spread slowly during the World War II years but virtually replaced both the linen and real-photo postcards by 1950. New buildings and new businesses transforming Midland into its modern appearance became more colorful but also more standardized.

Television, radio, and later digital photography and the Internet changed the nature of commercial advertising and personal travel memories. Postcards still remain but occupy a marginal niche in a 21st-century world of electronic memory storage. Yet the vintage cards from earlier times with their unique messages and invaluable images give us a glimpse of how