The lads who were fellows and lecturers in the 1920s loved to take excursions. When I first ran across this page in a scrapbook from that era (the same one that blessed us with “The Great Overall Fad of 1920”) I was curious about why these fun loving guys would head off to visit such a muddy and godforsaken looking town. (By the way, I’ve written before about two of the four travelers, Norman Ricker and Henry O. Nicholas.)
The next page cleared it up for me. Blue Ridge wasn’t so much a town (although there was indeed a ragged little town in the vicinity) as it was an oil field, and a big one discovered by Gulf in 1919:
They also visited the Pierce Junction field, which was quite a bit closer to Rice, roughly where the Astrodome was later built. You could actually see it from campus if you got up on top of a building. It was also a big find and it was brand new in 1921:
Bonus:
