IBEX, TEXAS. Ibex is on Farm Road 601 more than twenty miles east of Albany in eastern Shackelford County. It was founded in 1921 after oil was discovered in the Caddo lime formation. The town was named for the Ibex Oil Company of Colorado, the company that discovered the oil, and oil was the main source of its growth. In 1922 Ed Landreth built a $300,000 refinery plant at Ibex. During the town's brief heyday (1921-22), thousands of oil workers and their families crowded it. Some lived in tents while others camped out in pastures under roofs made of sheets. In 1923 a post office opened there; it closed sometime after 1930. At its peak, Ibex was home to the post office, a grocery store, a dry-goods store, a drugstore, a boardinghouse, a meat market, a central phone office, a dance hall, and several cafes and hotels. In addition, it had a four-room schoolhouse, which also served as a community meeting place and as a church. In 1925 a fire broke out and spread to eight storage tanks, each of which held 5,000 gallons of gasoline. Though Ibex was a boomtown in the 1920s, its economy was based heavily on oil, so its decline was rapid after oil production slowed. Its population was reported as forty-eight in 1948 and as twenty-five in 1960, 1970, and 1980. In the mid-1990s an abandoned oil refinery remained at the site, but the former boomtown had become a small farming community of twenty-five residents.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Shackelford County (Albany, Texas: Shackelford County Historical Survey Committee, 1974). Fred Tarpley, 1001 Texas Place Names (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).

Julie Kahl and John Morrow