John Fletcher Cotton
In the 1850s John Fletcher Cotton and his family lived in Dallardsville in Polk County. Once a year he would go in search of better hog pasture and when he found acorns galore around old Griffin Lake in Hardin County he left hogs to forage until late fall. He went hog huntin' and found his hogs slicked with glossy black tar spots. He had heard stories about mineral springs and tar patches and stories about Indian curing spots. An Indian had once shown Cotton a bottle of thick black oil, offered to lead him for $25 and he refused to pay the price. He penned the hogs for several days, then released and followed them until they headed into the oil-soaked earth they loved to root in to get rid of lice. He sunk a two-inch pipe into the slough and waited as oil rose in the pipe. He and his grandfather William Henry Hart headed for Old Hardin, took out their 160 acre headrights, built a log cabin. He returned to Dallardsville and before the end of the Civil War moved his wife Elizabeth, four sons and one daughter. The new home was close to the hog wallow and he tried digging a well with shovels but after finding giant ten inch long teeth and a great skull, decided it wasn't t he proper place to dig. He made a deal with Edward von Hartin of Galveston to obtain petroleum on his land. It often caught fire as lengths of
pipes were added and his wife got irritated when several good quilts were burned trying to put it out. A little gas and oil came out but quit at 100 feet and for years the last casing protruded from the ground. From the Big Thicket Guidebook