Some of you may be Facebook subscribers. If you are, you may want to follow Traces of Texas, which is a gold mine of old photographs from across the state.
Here's a photo posted recently. It shows a mud pit fire near Friendswood in 1938. The fellow in the dark vest and trousers is John Butler. The other two men weren't identified, but a fellow who commented on the photo explained what the fire was all about.
It was a control burn of the first 'liquid' to come out of the well. It was poor-quality, contaminated petroleum, so the driller sluiced it into the mud pit, where it was burned off. No way he could get away with that nowadays.
It's a pretty good photo for several reasons.
