Humble Texas 1905 Fire. (original) (raw)

The inferno incinerated men and mules and equipment. Before the fire died out for lack of fuel, it had consumed some 900,000 gallons of crude.

After the fire, Hudson figured he had been in the oil business long enough. He returned to Hill County, but in early October decided to take up farming in West Texas. With his wife and three children, Hudson set out in a covered wagon for Haskell County. And that's where he stayed for the rest of his long life.

But Hudson never forgot that fiery night in 1905, later recollecting that 40 men and 160 mules had perished in the Humble disaster that transformed him into a West Texan.

The exact death count may never be known. Newspaper of the day accounts had the number of casualties ranging from a hard-to-believe solitary death to 40 or 50 fatalities. The day after the fire, the Houston Chronicle reported 15 deaths, but the stories said that the heat of the fire had reduced man and animal to piles of ashes, preventing an accurate assessment of the death toll.

The Jim Crow racism of the day also played a role in the inexact accounting. The Chronicle reported that only one of the victims, a watchman named "Slim" was white. The others were black.

Another reason for the lack of clarity on the effects of the disaster is that the fire occurred before the oil industry had any regulation to speak of. The Texas Railroad Commission, created in 1892 to oversee railroad rates in the state, had no authority yet over the nascent petroleum industry. (It would come, but much later.) The concept of federal industrial safety regulation was not even a gleam in a liberal Congressman's eye, the creation of OSHA not coming until 1969.

Since the fire clearly had been the result of an act of nature, no authority investigated whether the storage facilities had been safely constructed and no entity held hearings or compiled an official report.

The Humble field played soon out, and the surviving men and mules moved to the next paying field, a process that would continue in the state well into the 1930s. By then, of course, heavy machinery had pretty much replaced the need for mules though some oil companies used them until the 1950s.

A couple of years after the fire, a man named Frank Rilling, probably an oilfield worker, sent a penny postcard showing the towering black smoke from the Humble fire to his girlfriend in Bridgeport, Conn.

"Received your pretty postal [post card] with many thanks," he wrote. "I am in a hurry answering, am I not[?]" Then Rilling scribbled beneath the image: "This was a grand thing to see as it burned at night."

Of course, it hadn't been grand for the family and friends of the men lost, not to mention all the mules. But that fire got Charlie Hudson and his family to Haskell County.