Troy Gray’s not expecting a real gusher to erupt at Spindletop on Saturday.

But he’d settle for an overflow crowd of visitors to the Spindletop Gladys City Boomtown Museum at Lamar University.

The Spindletop director and his staff have big plans for a celebration of the 117^th anniversary of the Lucas Gusher, which changed the face of the oil business in Texas and the world.

To be precise, that anniversary comes at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, marking the moment on Jan. 10, 1901, that ended eight years of expectations, toil and frustration around the Sour Spring Mound near Beaumont, the moment when the longtime dream of local character Pattillo Higgins finally bore fruit.

Higgins’ history over much of the previous eight years involved skeptical partners, inferior tools, local derision and his own, relentless vision and hope.

Then, at late morning on a raw January day, oil gushed twice the height of the derrick that sought it and oil that exceeded every dream spilled out unceasingly over the Jefferson County landscape.

Gray and the museum staff would like people here to sense that excitement of a new age in Texas, to understand Higgins’ vision and Anthony Lucas’ genius, to acquaint themselves with the vision of Gladys City and the fledgling town and wildcatter culture that erupted like a Texas well.

Here’s how Judith Walker Linsley, Ellen Walker Rienstra and Jo Ann Stiles described in “Giant Under the Hill,” their Spindletop history, the events that turned dream into reality:

“A low rumble came from deep in the earth, and the gurgle became a roar. The mud blossomed into a fountain, then began to blow skyward until it spewed up through the top of the derrick,” they wrote.

“Intermixed with the mud, rocks began to shoot hundreds of feet into the air to rain down on the derrick and the surrounding countryside.”

Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer winner for his oil history, “The Prize,” said Spindletop led the U.S. into the oil age, proving oil could be so plentiful that its uses could expand from lubricant to an energy source that would fuel horseless carriages. And so it began, here.

The Spindletop museum will give you some of that and more if you visit Saturday. It will teach you about the era, its fashions, lifestyles and culture, the backdrop for the birth of the oil age.

There will be “gushers” at 10:30 and 4:15 — don’t worry, it’s just water — and a “temperance” march, film and demonstration and a word or two about persistence.

Gray said he’s hoping 500 people will make it the museum Saturday, which was the crowd size for the 2016 celebration. Cold limited last year’s turnout.

Gates open at 10, close at 5. Admission costs are a mere pittance.

It’s Spindletop’s history. Yours, too.

Embrace it.