United Gas Public Service Company discovered the Rodessa Oil Field one mile west on July 7, 1935, when United’s L.L. Young No. 1, staked on April 13 and begun on April 24, was completed at a depth of 6,048 feet and tested as high as 8,000 barrels a day through various size chokes, without an open-flow test. Rodessa, named for the daughter of a Kansas City Southern Railway official after the line was routed through the area on June 22, 1896, had survived as a small agricultural community after nearby Spoonful and Frog Level disappeared; before the oil discovery it was little more than a general store, a filling station, and a dozen inhabitants. The strike quickly turned it into a boom town as land and lease men, drilling contractors, roughnecks, drillers, pipe liners, truckers, supply houses, machine shops, and honky-tonks arrived, tents and cots spread even into the cemetery, buildings rose for more than a mile along both sides of Main Street, and shotgun houses of tin and corrugated iron sprang up everywhere. By the spring of 1936, more than 100 rigs were running in the field and Rodessa’s population had climbed to nearly 15,000, with rooms and meals at a premium. The field had first gained notice with the R.W. Norton-Hill No. 1 gas discovery on August 3, 1930, and about 20 gas wells were drilled before United’s Young No. 1 found oil 1-1/2 miles to the north. The Rodessa Field spread along the Rodessa fault into Arkansas and into Cass and Marion counties, Texas, and its mile-deep oil production helped prove five new producing structures and uncover deeper pay levels in six North Louisiana fields. Production at the discovery well declined until it was stopped on December 31, 1940, and the eight-year-old well was plugged and abandoned on June 1, 1943, but the discovery yielded millions of barrels of oil and perhaps ensured Rodessa’s survival.