Town of the Week

Come with us to Kountze, Texas; just listen in.

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Kountze, Texas
February 20, 1999
(rebroadcast from June 10, 1995)

The cradle of this country's oil industry is found in the big thicket of east Texas. The thicket is a 50 mile circle of canebreak-rattler infested swampland about 30 miles north of Beaumont. Claustrophobically dark and dank, dripping with vines and Spanish moss, hunters bring their best dogs here trailing razorbacks, wildcats and wolves. And if they veer off the trails, the sheriff keeps a pack of bloodhounds to rescue lost souls.

At night in the thicket, big luminous balls of fire rise up; probably something to do with the petroleum content of the swamp. The thicket's sour lake and Saratoga oil fields are the fields from which Chevron and Texaco began. On the east edge of the thicket is the town of Kountze; 25 hundred people and the home of the fighting lions and lionettes.

Kountze is the seat of Hardin county, and is famous for its spring break. During the celebration, the vows of the only married armadillos in the country, Hoover and Star, will be renewed for the seventeenth year. Along with petroleum production, timber cutting is an important economic marker, as is the manufacture of paper board cores. This is a town with a sense of humor, and it's our town of the week, Kountze, Texas.