The story is written that a young Conrad Hilton came to Texas, specifically to the North Texas oil fields, looking for a bank in which he could invest. He had an entrepreneurial spirit with some experience and he arrived in an area that was booming with the recent discoveries of oil. He went from one boom town to another, Wichita Falls to Breckenridge, without any success in acquiring a banking institution and ended up in Cisco, Texas. He didn’t do much better there getting banking business. The story goes on that when Hilton went to the Mobley Hotel looking for a room he was impressed by the volume of business that the oil boom had brought to that hotel. He changed his mind about the banking business and bought the hotel, and the rest was history.
A few years later Hilton had moved on to Dallas and other big cities. The North Texas oil fields around Cisco turned out not to be the bonanza that was going to make everyone rich. Like a gold rush when the gold runs out, the boom towns faded back to the mostly agricultural small towns that they had been or disappeared. The raucous boom town of Desdemona, TX had to have Texas Rangers sent in after the church was torched during the height of the oil boom, but today all that’s left of Desdemona is a couple of buildings.
Desdemona at the hight of the boom with dirt streets jammed with cars and main street lined with hotels and what's left today.
US Post Office, Desdemona, TX, Texas Escapes photo
This cycle repeated itself in several places and at different times in Texas. With each oil boom people built hotels and when the boom went bust sometimes the hotel buildings remained, but what happened to them? Several of these oil boom town hotels are listed in the PLACES pages.
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