After Spindletop erupted in southeastern Texas on January 10, 1901, launching an oil boom in the state, drilling spread across Texas and reached the Panhandle by the 1920s. In May 1921, The Gulf Production Company discovered oil at Gulf Burnett #2 in Carson County, and a few months later The Gulf Company began drilling on the Dial Ranch of J.C. and C.L. Dial. Gulf Dial #1 used cable-tool drilling for a shallow well beneath an approximately 80-foot wooden derrick. In the spring of 1922, after months of drilling, the well began filling with hundreds of feet of oil. Although the nearby Smith-Capers well had been established first, Gulf Dial #1 became Hutchinson County's first successful oil well. By the summer of 1922 it pumped about 500 barrels a day, though later production fell to 135 barrels a day. Its success led workers and other residents to build a small camp in the oil field, and in 1925 Dial, Texas, was established with eighty to one hundred oil field workers and their families. Gulf Dial #1 produced oil for more than 50 years, and although the Dial lease later faded as production from its many wells declined, the field was important to Hutchinson County's early economic development and helped lead to the founding of Borger as a highly successful oil town in the United States.