Eagle Ford Shale Boom Fuels ‘Madhouse’ in South Texas Counties
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For the last 30 years, the quiet, dusty crossroads of Texas Routes 119 and 72 in Yorktown mostly consisted of a Dairy Queen on one corner, a gas station across the street and some traffic, usually heading somewhere else.
Ranchers joked that it was possible to make a small fortune in raising cattle on the mesquite and cactus range -- if you started with a very large fortune. Population in rural, south Texas grew slowly or not at all during the 2000s as suburbs boomed around Houston, Dallas and Austin.