Twin Cities of the Permian Basin – History of Midland and Odessa, Texas

Texas’ western-most paired cities, Midland and Odessa also are two of its younger cities. Though located in different counties, these two cities have a common reason for being: the railroad.

Neither community existed until the Texas and Pacific Railroad pushed through in 1881. When track layers finally completed the line two years later, the state was spanned for the first time by iron rails.

Midland got its name because it lay mid-way between Fort Worth and El Paso on the line. Odessa, the next stop to the west, was named after the Odessa region in Russia. Both places became seats of their respective counties, Midland in 1885, Ector in 1891.

Until the 1920s, both communities were quiet little ranching towns-each a place to buy supplies and ship cattle. But in 1923, one of the biggest oilfields in the world was discovered in Reagan County when the Santa Rita No. 1 well came in. Oil had been found a couple of years earlier in Mitchell County, northeast of Midland on the T&P.;

At first San Angelo, in Tom Green County, prospered most from this new economic activity. But when the Yates oil field came in at Iraan, a location closer to the Midland-Odessa area than it was to San Angelo, the two towns along the T&P; began to get the commerce generated by the oil activity.

Midland evolved as the white collar headquarters town, the place where the deals were made and the engineers lived. One of those wheeler-dealers was George Herbert Walker Bush, who lived with his wife Barbara and sons in a small house there for several years in the 1950s. One of his sons, George W., went on to become only the second son of a President to fill the same office.

While Midland was home to the coat-and-tie crowd, Odessa became the blue collar town, home to the working men who put up the derricks, drilled the wells and kept them running.

Today, both cities-with a combined population of more than a quarter million– rise out of the near-desert of the geologic feature that has become the collective used to describe the area, the Permian Basin.

The oil industry built the two cities and the ebb and flow of the price of a barrel of West Texas crude still controls the area’s economy, bringing alternate periods of boom and bust.