The Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) regulates the oil and gas industry to prevent the waste of resources and to protect property rights and the environment. These are plat maps of oil and gas leases or fields and survey maps. The maps and plats were submitted to the RRC by operators and maintained by the Commission because of information they contain about oil and gas wells in the state. Some maps are accompanied by correspondence about the leases, drilling operations, acreage assigned to specific wells or related topics; some have affidavits attached. Also present are notices of change in lease ownership or operators, and in a few files are potential test forms for wells that were filed with the Railroad Commission. Dates covered are about 1930 to 1960, bulk 1941-1954. Correspondence is usually with oil and gas operators or drilling companies. Some of the plat maps are certified, giving the date the plat was drawn, the survey, field name, county, operator, acres shown, and number of acres in the lease. Items shown on the survey and other plat maps are generally oil, gas, and water well locations; oil/gas lease and field boundaries; land and/or lease owners; cities and towns; and rivers and creeks. The maps often contain notes about the wells. Most of the maps were drawn by local surveyors and cover specific leases or oil/gas fields. This series contains files for district 8 (covering west Texas), district 10 (covering the Panhandle), and a few maps for district 4 (covering south Texas). Remaining plat files, if they still exist, are at the Railroad Commission. Drilling permits and applications are on file at the Railroad Commission, in the records section of the Oil and Gas Division. This finding aid describes a single series of the Railroad Commission of Texas records. See Railroad Commission of Texas: An Overview of Records (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tslac/20078/tsl-20078.html) for more records series. To prepare this inventory, the described materials were cursorily reviewed to delineate series, to confirm the accuracy of contents lists, to provide an estimate of dates covered, and to determine record types.
