20 Absurd Facts about Eastern Texas That Sound Fake (But Aren't)

20 Absurd Facts about Eastern Texas That Sound Fake (But Aren't) Eastern Texas is far stranger than most people realize. From a lake created by a 100-mile logjam to oil fields so productive they crashed prices, giant salt columns rising underground, carnivorous plants, asteroid craters, shifting borders, and a city that built one of America’s biggest ports 50 miles inland — East Texas is full of facts that sound fake but are completely real. In this video, we count down 20 absurd facts about Eastern Texas that prove this region is anything but ordinary. You’ll learn about: • Caddo Lake and the Great Raft • The East Texas oil boom • The “World’s Richest Acre” in Kilgore • How East Texas oil helped shape global petroleum policy • Rising salt domes beneath the Gulf Coast • The Strategic Petroleum Reserve • High Island • The Big Thicket • Petrified palmwood • The Leon County impact crater • Texarkana’s two-state post office • The Neutral Ground • The moving Texas-Oklahoma border • Hurricane Harvey’s record rainfall • Houston subsidence • The Houston Ship Channel • Johnson Space Center One of the craziest stories is Caddo Lake. For centuries, the Red River carried so much timber that a massive logjam known as the Great Raft backed water into the surrounding landscape and helped create the lake. Then engineers removed the raft. The lake nearly drained. So a dam was built to keep it alive. That means one of Texas’s most famous natural lakes now survives because humans had to artificially maintain what nature originally created. Then there is the East Texas oil field. At its peak, drilling became so dense that downtown Kilgore had roughly two dozen derricks packed onto a single city block — the famous “World’s Richest Acre.” Production became so extreme that crude prices collapsed, forcing state regulators to impose production limits that later became a model studied by OPEC. And beneath much of the region, ancient Jurassic salt is still slowly rising through