{"id":435517,"date":"2026-09-14T11:56:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T11:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/435517\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T11:56:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T11:56:11","slug":"east-texas-town-never-tires-of-talking-about-legend-of-stolen-spanish-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/435517\/","title":{"rendered":"East Texas town never tires of talking about legend of stolen Spanish gold"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Big Thicket, 1927. The thriving sawmill town of\u00a0Silsbee sits a few miles from the thickly forested Neches River<\/a> bottomlands. In these spooky, nearly impenetrable woods, legends of long-buried gold pass from family to family and generation to generation-treasure thought to be abandoned by Spanish explorers centuries earlier, but never found.<\/p>\n

Then, one night in May, a suspicious explosion blew a hole in the forest and splattered mud and dirt for 50 feet in all directions. At the bottom of the hole was the unmistakable outline of a cast-iron cauldron, exactly the kind of container where ill-gotten gold pieces might have been kept.<\/p>\n

A correspondent from the Beaumont Journal, which in 1983 merged with the Beaumont Enterprise (one of Chron’s sister publications<\/a>), visited the site a few days after the explosion, but left with little he could prove. “Only [the cauldron’s] smooth, rounded imprint in the soft earth many feet under the surface of the ground is left to give evidence of its presence,” he wrote.<\/p>\n

The story, however, never quite went away. In fact, it resurfaced this week on the Ice House Museum and Cultural Center<\/a> in Silsbee’s Facebook page<\/a>. Museum owner Susan Kilcrease<\/a> told Chron that lately the page’s readers have been discussing other evidence of Spanish explorers’ passage, including saddles found hanging in nearby trees, the topic of an upcoming exhibition at the museum.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Spanish conquistador Coronado prepares to cross the Rio Grande in 1540. (Bettmann Archive\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Anyhow, the explosion also happened close to a pair of trees that had been auspiciously marked: a pine sapling with a two-inch strip cut from the bark, and a burro carved into a magnolia which, the Journal reporter noted, “bore signs of antiquity.”<\/p>\n

The spot was also close to trails that eventually connected to well-known pre-automobile thoroughfares such as the Natchez Trace or El Camino Real-the latter was some distance from Silsbee, running from Mexico City to San Antonio and Nacogdoches, but another so-called ‘Spanish Road’ was much closer-so that part of the legend is at least plausible.<\/p>\n

“The rest is all family lore, but there [are] a lot of those stories,” Kilcrease said. “I would not be a bit surprised if some of that gold was still buried out there along the river.”<\/p>\n

As the story goes, the Journal’s reporter was accompanied by a 70-year-old local doctor who had lived in the area all his life and was convinced the cauldron-shaped imprint in the hole was “unmistakable” evidence of bygone Spanish gold. The doctor had also heard that, the night before, a pair of automobiles had been seen on the logging trails near the spot of the explosion.<\/p>\n

Additionally, a “shabbily dressed” stranger had been seen around Silsbee for several days beforehand, taking his meals in town but spending most of his time in the woods, “even sleeping under the trees,” the reporter wrote. He mysteriously vanished shortly after the explosion.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Steinhagen Reservoir of the Neches River in 1964 (Erich Andres\/United Archives\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Other accounts of what might have happened that spring night while Silsbee slept belong to the realms of folklore and rumor. But another explosion, which may or may not be the same one, was somewhat better documented. This one was an oil-well blowout that wound up prominently featured in a 1937 issue of Life magazine. Kilcrease has a copy in the museum.<\/p>\n

“It was the first real blowout [in the area] because there was fire,” Kilcrease said. “It was like daylight in this area for I forgot how many weeks it was, and they didn’t know what to do with it. It made a huge crater, and I could take you to it today.”<\/p>\n

The blowout timeline doesn’t quite align with that of the Journal reporter and the cauldron-marked hole-in fact, they’re a decade off-but time does funny things with people’s memories. Kilcrease diligently researches many of the artifacts and tall tales that come her way. This isn’t one of those.<\/p>\n

But when the Journal’s account of the explosion resurfaced, Kilcrease admitted, she couldn’t help but wonder: “Could that have been the same thing?”<\/p>\n

More Gulf Coast<\/p>\n

Waters<\/a> | Disney Cruise Line quells rumors about Texas sailings<\/a>
Buffett<\/a> | Margaritaville at Sea adds Galveston sailings starting 2027<\/a>
Science<\/a> | Galveston emerging as Texas’ future technology center<\/a><\/p>\n

| Texas city residents protest after mayor’s lurid arrest<\/a><\/p>\n

For more Gulf Coast news and features from Chron, sign up for The Third Coast newsletter here.<\/a><\/p>\n

This article originally published at East Texas town never tires of talking about legend of stolen Spanish gold<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Big Thicket, 1927. The thriving sawmill town of\u00a0Silsbee sits a few miles from the thickly forested Neches…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[150991,104673,150990,150988,150989,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-435517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-kilcrease","tag-neches-river","tag-silsbee","tag-spanish-explorers","tag-susan-kilcrease","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}