Yount-Lee Oil Company
The Yount-Lee Oil Company, founded in 1914, was the successor to the Yount-Rothwell Oil Company which had been formed earlier by Miles Franklin Yount and Talbot Frederick Rothwell. Yount headed up the new enterprise and counted among his partners Thomas Peter Lee, William Ellsworth Lee, Emerson Francis Woodward, Talbot Frederick Rothwell, John Henry Phelan, Beeman Ewell Strong, Frank E. Thomas, and Maximilian Theodore Schlicher. With a new fusion of capital provided by T. P. Lee, Yount was confident that the Spindletop oil field had not been tapped out, so he set about acquiring large tracts of land in the area. On November 14, 1925, his McFaddin No. 2 well struck oil at about 2,500 feet, sparking a second Spindletop oil boom.
Yount went on to acquire mineral rights in several of the Gulf Coast's major fields, and he built the infrastructure necessary to
ship his company's oil to destinations around the world from his headquarters in Beaumont,
Texas. Before his death in 1933, Yount, his business partners and associates, had built the company into one of the
largest and most successful independent oil operators in the country. Within two years, on July 31, 1935, the stockholders sold
Yount-Lee Oil Company for $46.2 million to Houston attorney, Wright Francis Morrow, who
immediately began to parcel off the assets. Stanolind Oil, later a part of Amoco, bought most of the oil inventory and oil-producing properties for over $41 million, which at the time
represented one of the largest financial transactions in American business history.
Source: McKinley, Fred B., and Greg Riley. Black Gold to Bluegrass: From the Oil Fields of
Texas to Spindletop Farm of Kentucky. Austin: Eakin Press, 2005.
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