Student Spotlight: A Courthouse Field Trip with a Twist

In the Introduction to Land Management Practices course, students are asked to visit their local county courthouse to learn firsthand how property and conveyance records are organized. This field trip assignment helps students understand how landmen trace mineral ownership and record oil and gas leases — critical steps in ensuring that leases are properly recorded and binding against third parties.

Travis Lawson and Frank Montgomery, two friends took the course together and submitted a joint report.

Recently, two students took the assignment a step further by teaming up to visit their courthouse together. They not only learned how the deed and conveyance records are indexed, but also submitted a thoughtful joint report — complete with a great photo of the two of them in front of the courthouse.

“It was fascinating to see how legal descriptions and property transfers are recorded in real life,” they shared.

Their collaboration and enthusiasm perfectly captured the spirit of the assignment — connecting classroom learning with the real-world practices of professional landmen.

In Their Own Words: Courthouse Report

By Travis Lawson and Frank Montgomery

We decided to be different with our report and decided to go to the Garden City courthouse. It’s in Glasscock County, about an hour from where we live in Midland. It’s a tiny town with a total population of 334.

The courthouse itself underwent renovations because the public records archive had grown too large for the space provided, so they built an adjacent building to house all the documentation. When we arrived, we were greeted by the county clerks, who were very nice ladies, who showed us around. The deeds and conveyances were numbered by the year in which they were made a public record. Some of the deeds were also put into either a white binder for general paperwork or a red binder for maps. The earliest of the records that we found was a deed from the late 1800s. We found some deeds that used metes-and-bounds descriptions.

They also had computers for anyone who needed them; the software and programs were hard to navigate unless you had the exact document number to type into the search bar. The whole public system was available on the internet around 1996. Here are some photos that best describe our field trip. We didn’t feel comfortable asking the clerk for a picture of herself, so we negated that part.