Author to discuss North Louisiana's oil boomtowns in Thursday event

Author to discuss North Louisiana's oil boomtowns in Thursday event

SHREVEPORT - Drive through Oil City in northern Caddo Parish and one will see old wooden oil derricks sitting idle on Caddo Lake.

Turn back the clock 120 years, and towns like Oil City were exploding in growth and popularity as a rush of oil workers came in to extract oil from the newly discovered Caddo-Pine Island oil field.

Author Dr. Henry A. Wiencek explored this transformative three-decade period in the early 1900s in his 2024 book Oil Cities: The Making of North Louisiana's Boomtowns.

Wiencek will discuss the explosive growth, and in most cases, rapid decline of these towns once the easiest obtainable oil ran out in a Thursday event at the LSUS Collaboratory.

The event begins at 6 p.m. and will include a discussion and a question-and-answer session. Attendees can reserve their spot for Thursday's event, which is sponsored by the James Smith Noel Collection.

This lecture is based on the first historical monograph on the region's dramatic oil boom reveals a contested history, in which the oil industry had to adapt its labor, tools, and investments to meet North Louisiana's unique economic, social, political, and environmental dynamics.

The oil rush drew participants from around the world, which crashed into the Jim Crow culture of Caddo Parish at that time.

Towns like Oil City, Vivian, Hosston, Mooringsport, Rodessa and Gilliam still exist in some form today, and others like Trees are nonexistent.

Wiencek delved into the topic during his dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin, and his work that turned into a book examines how sparsely populated rural farmland transformed into oil boomtowns seemingly overnight.

After his postdoctoral fellowship at UT's Institute for Historical Studies, Wiencek has spent the past eight years in software as an instructor and a senior-level business consultant with Blackbaud, a company that creates software for nonprofit organizations.