Louisiana State Oil & Gas Museum

Twenty miles north of Shreveport, Oil City marks the spot where prospectors struck oil at Caddo-Pine Island in 1905. The discovery transformed northwest Louisiana — within six years, Gulf Refining had built drilling platforms on Caddo Lake, among America's earliest offshore operations. The field still produces today, more than a century after that first strike. The Louisiana State Oil & Gas Museum, dedicated in 2004, occupies the ground where it happened. Photographs and films trace the arc from discovery to platform construction. Life-size dioramas reconstruct the work — the rigs, the lake, the men who built them. A historic railroad depot stands as part of the collection, a reminder that oil moved by rail before pipelines stitched the country together. The museum opens Tuesday through Friday, 10am to 4pm, at 200 South Land Avenue. Go to see what offshore meant in 1911 — not the Gulf of Mexico, but a Louisiana lake where drillers figured out how to anchor platforms in water and pull crude from beneath. The techniques worked. The oil never stopped.