Panoramic photograph of oil derricks across an oil field

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Rows of wooden and steel derricks rise across a flat expanse in this panoramic view, the sheer number of towers making the scale of the field clear at a glance. Oil fields like this one spread quickly during the early twentieth century, when drilling booms in places such as Texas, Oklahoma and California turned barren land into dense networks of wells, pipelines and storage tanks. Panoramic prints were popular for documenting such sites, since a single wide frame could show how much ground a field covered and how closely the derricks were packed together.

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