Conroe: Oil Boomtown & the Courthouse Square

Conroe began as a sawmill in the pines. When Isaac Conroe set up a mill where two rail lines crossed in 1881, a switch on the tracks became a town, and lumber money built the first courthouse and the first downtown blocks. Then, in December 1931, a wildcatter named George Strake brought in a well a few miles southeast of here and changed everything. The Conroe oilfield became one of the largest in the country, and a sleepy county seat turned overnight into a boomtown of derricks, drug-store fortunes, and brand-new brick. The boom also nearly destroyed itself: in 1933 a runaway well cratered and burned for months, the famous 'Conroe Crater' whose black column could be seen from Houston, until engineers killed it with the first directional drilling on the Gulf coast. This short loop walks the courthouse square where that money landed — the Art Deco courthouse the oil boom paid for, the grand theater a drug-store-owner-turned-oilman built, the storefronts rebuilt after a great fire, and the house where it all began. Bring comfortable shoes and look up; the boom is written in the rooflines.