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Stella Dysart (1878-1966) was an American oil wildcatter who became famous for owning the world’s richest deposit of high-grade uranium ore in 1955.

Biography

Early life

Stella Dysart was born in 1878 in Slater, Missouri.

Oil

In 1923 Stella Dysart moved to New Mexico where she got into oil entrepreneurship and the real estate business. After purchasing a sheep range, called Ambrosia Lake, northwest of Grants in 1925 and on the southern edge of the oil-rich San Juan Basin, she would spend the next 25 years drilling for oil.

Dysart established the New Mexico Oil Properties Association and the Dysart Oil Company. To encourage investors, Dysart presented sales talks, made motion pictures of her properties, and produced a 1931 promotional handout about Grants called Black Gold. When this proved ineffective during the Depression, Dysart decided to subdivide her holdings into small lots for sale to modest investors. She reduced some of those tracts down to as small as one-sixteenth of an acre and sold them for as little as eighteen American dollars each. Over the next twenty years Dysart’s oil misfortunes continued, but she persisted in selling lots, paying taxes, and stockpiling unsuccessful drilling.

Uranium boom

After Paddy Martinez’s discovery of uranium in New Mexico, south of the Ambrosia Lake range of Dysart, Dysart shifted her attention from oil to uranium. She showed her drilling logs to a young geologist named Louis B. Lothman. He drilled 360 feet down and found a 17-foot-thick uranium deposit. This find would prove to be the start of a new uranium rush to Grants.