Although natural gas had been discovered as early as 1922, the vast potential of the Hugoton-Panhandle field was not known until a 1927 well about 2,600 feet below the surface southwest of Hugoton.

In southwestern Kansas, the Stevens County Gas & Historical Museum in Hugoton is above a giant natural gas producing area (in red) that extends 8,500 square miles into the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles.

A small museum sits above a giant natural gas field.

In far southwestern Kansas, the Stevens County Gas & Historical Museum in Hugoton opened on May 16, 1961. It educates visitors about one of the largest natural gas fields in North America.

Every year Hugoton – the state’s “natural gas capital” – hosts as an annual “Gas Capital Car Show & Rod Run” that takes place on the fourth Saturday in August. The community’s museum, founded by Gladys Renfro, curator, and a few dedicated volunteers, serves “as a memento of the Hugoton gas field and the progressive development of Stevens County.”

The Stevens County Gas & Historical Museum includes the Santa Fe Train Depot in Hugoton, Kansas.

The 14-county Kansas gas field, part of a larger group extending 8,500 square miles into the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, has produced more than 29 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, notes the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS).

About 11,000 wells produce both oil and gas in the Kansas portion of the Hugoton area – and thousands of miles of pipeline carry Hugoton gas throughout the United States.

“Hugoton production is a major source of natural gas and oil for the state and the nation,” KGS says, adding that the economic value produced in 14 counties of southwest Kansas exceeds 50 percent of all gas and oil produced in the state. “The major gas fields of this area have produced enough gas to supply every household in Kansas for 364 years.”

“Hugoton-Panhandle gas provides the world’s largest source of helium from which the U.S. Government has drawn a 40 year supply stockpile and spacecraft and other industries obtain current needs,” notes a monument in Guymon, Oklahoma.

Although natural gas had been discovered as early as 1922, near Liberal, Kansas, that well did not produce oil – so it was considered of little value and remained unused for several years, explains KGS.

“In 1927, gas was discovered at the Independent Oil and Gas Company’s Crawford No. 1, about 2,600 feet below the surface southwest of Hugoton,” says KGS. In 1929, Argus Pipe Line Company started construction of a pipeline to furnish gas to Dodge City.

Beginning in the 1930s, Phillips Petroleum Company produced Hugoton natural gas from 3,000 feet deep in Texas County, Oklahoma. “This field with subsequent deeper discoveries of oil and gas has provided landowners with royalty revenue and cheap fuel,” explains an historic marker in a Guymon, Oklahoma, park.

“There are nearly 8,000 producing oil or gas wells in Texas County today,” the historic marker notes. “For 75 years, the county has been one of the largest sources of revenue for the state of Oklahoma through taxes on oil and gas production.”

The Stevens County Gas & Historical Museum, 905 S. Adams Street in Hugoton, today includes early oil patch equipment, restored buildings – including an historic Santa Fe Hugoton Train Depot – an 1887 school house and home, a grocery store, and a barber shop. A natural gas well drilled in 1945 is still producing at the museum.

A 2004 Hugoton Asset Management Project brought together KGS and eight industry partners in the Hugoton field – to build a “knowledge and technical base required for intelligent stewardship, identification of new opportunities, and continued improvement in recovery strategies.”

Editor’s Note – Natural gas shale discoveries (and advanced production technologies) have overtaken the Hugoton’s once dominant role. In 2009, the Hugoton gas area produced 328 billion cubic feet of natural gas, making it the ninth largest source of gas in America.

Significant natural gas shale discoveries in the Fayetteville, Arkansas, region (2004) and Haynesville, Louisiana, region (2008) have estimated production volumes of 517 billion cubic feet and 204 billion cubic feet respectively.

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On May 12, 2007 - as part of statehood centennial celebrations – state-of-the-art petroleum museums opened in Ponca City and Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

A circa 1880s Continental Oil Company horse-drawn tank wagon welcomes visitors to the Conoco Museum in Ponca City, Oklahoma, which opened in 2007. Phillips Petroleum Company, once headquartered 70 miles east in Bartlesville, merged with Conoco in 2002.

The Conoco Museum tells the story of a petroleum company that began as a small kerosene distributor serving 19th century pioneer America.

“These museums reaffirm our Oklahoma roots,” proclaimed Jim Mulva, chairman and CEO of ConocoPhillips, which built the Conoco Museum in Ponca City and the Phillips Museum in Bartlesville as “gifts to the people of Oklahoma, visitors to the state, and our employee and retiree populations around the world.” Read the rest of this entry »

The East Texas oilfield remains the largest and most prolific oil reservoir ever discovered in the contiguous United States. Here is the story of Haroldson Lafayette “H.L.” Hunt – and “Dad” Joiner and “Doc” Lloyd – the Great Depression, and one of the U.S. petroleum industry’s greatest discoveries.

“Thousands crowded their way to the site of Daisy Bradford No. 3, hoping to be there when and if oil gushed from the well to wash away the misery of the Great Depression,” notes one Kilgore, Texas, historian. Independent oilman Columbus “Dad” Joiner will discover the East Texas oilfield, which remains the largest in the lower-48 states.

J. Malcolm Crim of Kilgore names his wildcat well after his mother, Lou Della.

With a crowd of more than 4,000 landowners, leaseholders, stockholders, creditors and spectators watching – the Daisy Bradford No. 3 well erupts. It is on October 3, 1930, that a production test is done – resulting in a gusher of oil.

Incredible to most geologists, another wildcat well 10 miles to the north – the Lou Della Crim No. 1 – will begin flowing on December 28, 1930.

A month later and 15 miles still farther north, a third wildcat well, the Lathrop No. 1, comes in.

At first, the great distance between these discoveries convinced geologists, petroleum engineers – and virtually all of the major oil companies - that the wildcat wells had found separate oilfields. However, and to the delight of many small, struggling  farmers, it will become apparent the wells are part of a massive oil-producing field.

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The story of H.L. Hunt in oil booms of the 1920s and 1930s in Arkansas and East Texas spans much of the petroleum industry’s colorful history, notes the Hunt Oil Company website. Photo circa 1911.

In 1905, when Haroldson Lafayette “H.L.” Hunt was just 16 years old, he left his Illinois farm family and headed  west. Along the way, he worked as a dishwasher, mule team driver, logger, farmhand, and even tried out for semi-pro baseball. In his travels, he learned to gamble and played cards in bunkhouses, hobo jungles and saloons.

The Busey-Armstrong No. 1 well came in  on January 10, 1921, and quickly catapulted the population of El Dorado from 4,000 to over 25,000.

H.L. Hunt  arrived with his borrowed $50 and joined the other lease traders, speculators, and gamblers at a popular hotel.

“A person literally had to shoulder his way through the lobby from early in the morning until late at night,” notes one  account of El Dorado’s Garret Hotel. “The people, for the most part, were trying to make a fast dollar. It was a  seething mass of humanity. More wells were drilled in its lobby than in the field.” Read the rest of this entry »

Geology in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, marks the spot where on April 15, 1897, a large crowd gathered at Nellie Johnstone No. 1 to watch as as a “go devil” was used to “shoot” the well – a downhole nitroglycerin explosion to maximize production – before it was completed.

Prior to the Civil War, America’s search for oil prompted entrepreneurs, speculators, and wildcatters to seek their fortunes on the great plains of the Indian Territory.

This was land reserved for Native Americans by Congress and home to its indigenous people as well as the “Five Civilized Tribes” – Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, and Chickasaw, which had been relocated from the Southeast.

Today, Oklahoma ranks 7th in U.S. oil production and 4th in natural gas. George B. Keeler and William Johnstone are remembered as the Indian Territory entrepreneurs who opened an Oklahoma oil boom that continues to this day.

Each of the Five Civilized Tribes established national territorial boundaries, constitutional governments, and advanced judicial and public school systems. The Indian Territory included present-day Oklahoma north and east of the Red River, as well as Kansas and Nebraska.

Discovering Indian Territory Oil

By 1856, fifty-one years before Oklahoma statehood, the Indian Territory had become home to the Five Civilized Tribes – as well as the Osage, Pawnee, Seneca, Shawnee, Delaware, and others.

A non-tribal member coming into the Indian Territory to work was required to take out a license or permit; one who married into a tribe was adopted and able to share in tribal property.

In 1859, Lewis Ross, a brother of Chief John Ross of the Cherokees, found a pocket of oil that produced about ten barrels a day for nearly a year. He was drilling for saltwater – brine being  much-desired for making salt, a food preservative.

Ross drilled his well on the Grand River near Salina in what is now Mayes County, Oklahoma. After deciding to sink a deeper well for greater production, he found oil instead. News spread of this potential source of tribal revenue.

Spectators watched as Miss Jenni Cass, dropped a weighted percussion device (often called a go devil) down the well bore to set off a waiting canister of nitroglycerin – producing a gusher that heralded the beginning of Oklahoma’s oil era.

According to the constitutions of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations at that time, the land was held in common by the Indian citizens of the nations – but the individual citizens could lease out a limited amount of land.

The Ross well was quickly depleted, but it proved that there was oil to be found in the Indian Territory.

By 1875, Jacob H. Bartles, another pioneer and adopted Delaware Indian, was operating a trading post on the Caney River in the Cherokee Nation.

Bartles employed two ambitious young men, George B. Keeler and William Johnstone. They too were adopted members of the Osage and Delaware tribes, respectively.

Within a few years, Keeler and Johnstone started their own competing general store on the other side of the Caney River, in what became Bartlesville. It was a successful enterprise and while the partners knew of oil seeps in the area at this time, they lacked the financial support and tribal permissions necessary to pursue the opportunity.

More than 20 years later, Keeler and Johnstone would make oil history just around the river bend from their general store.

The Search for Rock Oil

In 1884, the Cherokee Nation passed a law authorizing the “Organization of a company for the purpose of finding petroleum, or rock oil, and thus increasing the revenue of the Cherokee Nation.”

Five years later, a wildcatter named Edward Byrd secured mineral leases from the Cherokee Nation. He drilled his first well near present-day Chelsea (Rogers County) in 1890, and found oil at a depth of only 36 feet. His well produced about a half a barrel a day but his efforts were hampered severely by government regulation, inadequate transportation facilities and the lack of a readily accessible market.

Edward Byrd organized the U.S. Oil and Gas Company, and sold one half of his acreage to the Cherokee Oil and Gas Company. His Chelsea well is still celebrated as Oklahoma’s first.

A re-enactment of the dramatic moment that changed Oklahoma history highlighted the 2008 dedication of a 84-foot replica derrick at Discovery 1 Park in Bartlesville. The derrick replaced one dedicated in 1948.

Following Edward Byrd’s success, Kansas oilmen James Guffey and John H. Galey approached several prominent Indian citizens, including general store partners Keeler and Johnstone, and offered to purchase mineral sub-leases and pay a royalty of three and one-half percent to the Cherokee Nation on any petroleum production.

Years later George B. Keeler recalled, “Guffey and Galey of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were drilling at Neodesha, Kansas, in 1893. Mr. Galey got in his buggy and followed the mounds from Kansas to the mound at Bartlesville.

“He came to my store on the present site of Bartlesville and told me that there was oil here and that if I would get a lease from the Cherokees, he would drill a well. Mr. Galey said that he knew there was oil here because of the mounds which, in his opinion, had been thrown up by gas pressure; and he called attention to the broken edges of all the rocks which, he said, would be round if caused by water and erosion.”

However, before the deal could be completed, Guffey and Galey withdrew their backing and moved on to a new project near Beaumont, Texas. There, in 1901, they would bring in the famous well, “Spindletop.”

Nellie Johnstone No.1

Meanwhile, George Keeler, William Johnstone, Frank Overlees, their Indian wives, and other locals had acquired mineral leases on over 200,000 acres of Cherokee land. They ultimately secured new financial backing from the millionaire Chicago meat-packer Michael Cudahy’s “Cudahy Oil Company.”

The new venture’s search for oil began in earnest when they hired the well-known firm of “McBride and Bloom” from Independence, Kansas. Albert P. McBride and Camden L. Bloom had drilled Kansas’ first commercially successful well, Norman No.1, in what would come to be known as the Mid-Continent Field, before they ranged into the Indian Territory.

In December 1896, McBride and Bloom abandoned a 1,750 foot dry hole near Red Fork (today part of Tulsa) to drill a new well for Cudahy Oil Co. It took three-weeks of hauling equipment, tools, pipe and other materials 70-miles northward across the freezing Arkansas River to the new Keeler and Johnstone site on Spencer Creek of the Caney River.

Drilling began in January 1897, the same month that Bartlesville was incorporated with a population of about 200 people. Four months later, at 1,320 feet, the Nellie Johnstone No.1 well (named for partner William Johnstone’s six year-old daughter), showed for oil.

A downtown Oklahoma City parade celebrating the 2007 centennial of Oklahoma statehood included a float acknowledging Oklahoma’s petroleum heritage, seen here in an artist’s early conception.

“Shooting” had been used since the 1859 Drake well in Pennsylvania to stimulate production, so G. M. Perry, an expert shooter, was brought in. Perry had been McBride and Bloom’s shooter for the successful Norman No.1 well in Kansas.

Liquid nitroglycerin was poured into a metal canister – or “torpedo” – and lowered into the well on April 15, 1897, as a crowd of about 50 curious onlookers gathered. At 3 p.m., George Keeler’s stepdaughter, Miss Jenni Cass, dropped the “go devil” detonating device down the well bore to set off the waiting nitroglycerin.

The explosion caused Nellie Johnstone No.1 to blow in as a gusher, producing from 50 to 75 barrels of oil a day. Despite the production, the Cudahy Oil Co. was confronted with the same problem Edward Byrd had faced seven years earlier: more crude oil than the local market could consume.

With no storage tanks, pipelines, or railroads available, the Nellie Johnstone No. 1 was capped for two years.

Another chapter in Bartlesville’s rich petroleum history is exhibited at the Phillips Petroleum Company Museum, which opened May 12, 2007.

The railroad finally came to Bartlesville with the opening of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe in 1899. Oil could then be shipped from Bartlesville to Caney, Kansas, and from there by pipeline to a small Standard Oil refinery in Neodesha for processing into kerosene and other products.

With the railroad and pipeline, the Nellie Johnstone No.1, became commercially profitable in May 1900 with the initial shipment of oil at a price of $1.25 per barrel, less 25 cents for handling.

As the discovery well for the giant Bartlesville-Dewey Field, the Nellie Johnstone No.1 ushered in the oil era for Oklahoma Territory. It produced more than 100,000 barrels of oil in its lifetime. In the ten years following the Nellie Johnstone discovery, Bartlesville’s population grew from 200 to over 4,000 while Oklahoma’s oil production grew from 1,000 barrels to over 43 million barrels annually.

At the age of 12, future oil giant J. Paul Getty started selling the “Saturday Evening Post” in Bartlesville. By the age of 23, he had earned his first million in oil. Frank Phillips, perhaps most beloved of all the Bartlesville oil legends, established the international Phillips Petroleum Company, which remained in Bartlesville until merging with Conoco in 2003.

After the Nellie Johnstone success, production in the Indian Territory rose rapidly, adding much impetus towards the granting of Statehood in 1907. In the 10 years between the Nellie Johnstone and Statehood, Oklahoma became the largest oil-producing entity in the world.

Today, Oklahoma still ranks 7th in United States’ oil production and 4th in natural gas. George B. Keeler and William Johnstone are remembered as the Indian Territory entrepreneurs who opened an Oklahoma oil boom that continues to this day. Oklahoma’s first commercial oil well is commemorated north of downtown Bartlesville on Cherokee Avenue, where a rebuilt replica of the Nellie Johnstone No.1, stands at the original site.

The 1948 presentation of the well to the city of Bartlesville appropriately noted, “Like the rush for Oklahoma land, the discovery of oil attracted both men and capital from far and near, these pioneers in petroleum development were as rugged and self-sufficient as those who settled the land … Oklahoma’s two greatest industries, agriculture and petroleum, have developed largely hand in hand, and back of both developments are the pioneers, men of restless energy and unbounded faith.”

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Editor’s Note – According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Oklahoma continues to be a leading natural gas producing state with more than a dozen of the 100 largest natural gas fields in the country; Oklahoma has five petroleum refineries with a combined capacity of roughly three percent of the total U.S. distillation capacity.

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Outside the Page Museum of Los Angeles, life-size replicas of several extinct mammals are featured at the Rancho La Brea in Hancock Park. Although commonly called the “tar pits,” the pools are actually comprised of asphalt.

The La Brea “tar pits,” discovered on August 3, 1769, by Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola, exemplify the many natural petroleum seeps of southern California.

“We proceeded for three hours on a good road; to the right were extensive swamps of bitumen which is called chapapote,” Franciscan friar Juan Crespi noted in a diary of the expedition. “We debated whether this substance, which flows melted from underneath the earth, could occasion so many earthquakes.” Read the rest of this entry »

A failed oilman turns into an assassin?

John Wilkes Booth’s dreams of Pennsylvania oil wealth end in July 1864. Attempting to increase their oil well’s production, Booth and his partners instead “utterly ruined the hole and the well never yielded another drop.”

In January 1864, John Wilkes Booth made his first of several trips to Franklin, Pennsylvania, where he purchased an oil lease on the Fuller farm.

Maps of the day reveal the three-acre strip of land on the farm, about one mile south of Franklin and on the east side of the Allegheny River. A small marker can be found at the site where he drilled an oil well.

The Actor and Investor

The 1863 theater season had brought a handsome, 24-year-old aspiring actor the fame he had long pursued. For years, he had struggled in the shadows of his renowned thespian father, Junius, and brothers, Edwin and Junius, Jr.

Booth had opened his stage career in 1855 at the Charles Street Theatre in Baltimore and became a member of the Richmond Theatre in 1858. Unlike the rest of his family, he would become a Confederate sympathizer as audiences in Richmond adopted him as one of their own. They loved the energy he brought to his Shakespearean performances – his sword fights and dangerous leaps from balconies. Read the rest of this entry »

When a well strikes a high-pressure formation about 6,500 feet beneath Oklahoma City – and oil erupts skyward – the prolific Oklahoma oilfield will become famous worldwide.

Newsreel photographers will send film of the “Wild Mary Sudik” well to Hollywood. Within a week, newsreels appear in theaters around the country. When the Mary Sudik is brought under control, crews will recover 200,000 barrels of oil from pits and ponds.

The Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Company’s Mary Sudik No. 1 well flows for 11 days before being brought under control on April 6, 1930.

The well, which produces about 20,000 barrels of oil and 200 million cubic feet of natural gas a day, becomes a public sensation known as “Wild Mary Sudik.”

The giant discovery is featured in newsreels and on radio, according to “Oklahoma Journeys,” an audio program of the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City.

“At about 6:30 the morning of March 26, 1930, the crew of roughnecks drilling a well on the property of Vincent Sudik paused in their work,” the program begins about the well, which is near I-240 and Bryant Street in present day Oklahoma City.

“The tired drillers had been waiting for daylight to continue their work,” the audio tape notes.

Experts control the well with “a clever ball-shaped contrivance” that lowers a two-ton “overshot” cap.

The program’s narrator Michael Dean notes that after drilling to drilling to 6,471 feet, the roughnecks overlook a dangerous pressure increase in the well.

“The exhausted crew failed to fill the hole with mud,” he explains. “They didn’t know the Wilcox sand formation was permeated with natural gas under high pressure, and within minutes that sand under so much pressure found a release.”

The drilling crew is caught off guard when oil and natural gas suddenly “came roaring out of the hole,” Dean adds.

“Pipe stems were thrown hundreds of feet into the air like so many tooth picks. First there was gas then the flow turned green gold and then black,” he reports. “Oil shot hundreds of feet into the air, and for the next eleven days, the Mary Sudik ran wild.”

“Wild Mary” Daily Updates

On April 6, Floyd Gibbons of NBC Radio – who broadcast regular reports about the well – reports that after two unsuccessful attempts, the well is closed with a two-ton “overshot” cap.

An Associated Press article describes the “clever equipment” required to control the well without sparking a fire – a “double die was screwed into four inches of casing threads…a clever ball-shaped contrivance, called a fantail, was used to affix the double die to the casing.”

The fantail was placed over the well, “and the ‘Wild Mary’s’ pressure, playing through jets in the contrivance, aided in lowering the cap through the blast,” the article explains.

“With the petroleum geyser halted, operators in the field drew sighs of relief,” it concludes. “A stray spark from two clanking pieces of steel and the territory might have become a raging inferno.”

With the well was brought under control and the danger of fire eliminated, drilling continues at a frantic pace elsewhere in Oklahoma City.

However, the prolific, high-pressure of the Wilcox sands formation continued to challenge drillers and the technologies of the day.

An article in the Southwest Missourian newspaper reported:

Oklahoma City, April 7 – A gas well, estimated to be producing at a rate of 75,000,000 cubic feet a day, blew in at the edge of the city today, creating a new fire threat less than 24 hours after the wild No. 1 Mary Sudik gusher, several miles to the south, had been brought under control.

Recognizing the risks of drilling into the Wilcox sand, Oklahoma City passes additional ordinances for safety and well spacing in the city.

Although the first ram-type blowout preventer had been patented by James Abercrombie in 1926, many high-pressure Texas and Oklahoma oilfields would take time to tame.

The Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City includes the Devon Energy Oil and Gas Park.

In December 1933, Abercrombie patented an improved blowout preventer (patent No. 1,834,922), that set a new standard for safe drilling during the Oklahoma City oilfield boom. Read more in “Ending Oil Gushers – BOP.”

Visitors today  can see the valve that split in half and view newsreel film of the Wild Mary Sudik in the oil and gas and natural resources on exhibit at the Oklahoma History Center.

There also is the Devon Energy Oil and Gas Park with drilling and production equipment at the center, located on N.E. 23rd Street just east of the state capitol.

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As the Indiana natural gas boom continued, communities took great pride in what they thought to be an unlimited supply of natural gas. They erected arches of perforated iron pipe and let them burn day and night for months. Indiana lawmakers banned these wasteful “flambeaux” lights in 1891 – becoming one of the earliest states to legislate conservation.

The late 1880s discoveries of natural gas in Eaton and Portland ignited Indiana’s historic gas boom, which would dramatically change the state’s economy.

The “Trenton Field” as it would become known, spread over 17 Indiana counties and 5,120 square miles. It was the largest natural gas field known in the world. Within three years, more than 200 companies were drilling, distributing, and selling natural gas.

In 1859, the same year that “Colonel” Edwin L. Drake drilled the country’s first commercial oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, there were already 297 “manufactured gas” (known as coal gas) companies in the 33 United States. Read the rest of this entry »

An ancient drilling technology – the spring pole. Drawing by S. T. Pees and Associates.

Although oil would not be drilled for – and found – in Pennsylvania until three decades later, officially launching America’s petroleum industry, Kentucky claims the first oil gusher.

Boring for salt brine with a simple spring-pole device (used in ancient China) on a farm near Burkesville, Kentucky, Martin Beatty strikes an oilfield. Drilled for a local doctor, the March 11, 1829, gusher shoots “to the top of the surrounding trees.”

According to one Kentucky historian, the Old American Well, as it came to be called, “was the first commercially operated oil well in the United States, predating the establishment of the oil industry by some thirty years.”

The Kentucky State Geology Survey preserves an 1865 map “embracing about 16 miles square of Cumberland County.” The 1829 well drilled seeking salt water results in the “American Oil Well,” which produces oil that is bottled and sold for “medicinal” purposes.

Beatty drilled his Cumberland County well with “an apparatus consisting of a spring pole made from a strong sapling, set in the crotch of a tree, with a short ‘bit’ fastened to the free end of the pole.”

The driller manipulated this bit by his own foot power – and what a slow task this must have been, according to the Burkesville Riverfront Lodge Motel today located nearby. Its promotional article adds:

“The Old Oil Well led the parade in 1829, and so it will continue to mark the spot where the world’s greatest industry was born.”

The well’s marker – a large mill stone topped by a bronze tablet – was erected in 1934 by the Kentucky Legislature:

The history and subsequent events of the First Great American Gusher have been kept alive through a few interested citizens who have never, for any length of time, let go this birth of what has come to be a necessary part of the world today.

The 50,000 barrel, Old Oil Well, led the parade in 1829 and so it will continue to mark the spot where the world’s greatest industry was born.

Unfortunately, soon after its discovery, oil from the 171-foot-deep well reached the Cumberland River – where it ignited and burned for three weeks, halting riverboat traffic 50 miles downstream, according to the Kentucky Geological Survey (KGS).

Petroleum drilling, production and control technologies had not been invented.

“The salt borers were greatly disappointed,” reported an 1847 account of the discovery. “The well was neglected for several years, until it was discovered that the oil possessed valuable medicinal qualities.” Petroleum’s uses in medicine, which continues today, began as a cure-all bottled in large quantities and “extensively sold in nearly all the states in the Union.”

The 1810-1960 Burkesville Sesquicentennial booklet cites an August 22, 1919, article from the Burkesville Leader:

The well was a continuing puzzle to the curious travelers who succeeded in winding tortuous journey over bed of the creek, God made roads to Burkesville to view the spot of fame of which had preached to the “outside” world. There was a reputation as a cure all which spread around among the various adventurers through the years. The fluid was bottled and sold under the caption of “American Rock Oil.”

The writer knew personally, in later years, one man who vouched for its curative powers for baldness. He stated that when he left the oil field on Saturday night he always took his double handful of crude oil and thoroughly douzed his head in it massaging it into his scalp. When he died at the age of 91 he had a beautiful shock of white hair!

Kentucky today produces oil and natural gas in 52 counties. Oil production (green) is in the western and south-central areas. Most natural gas (red) is produced in eastern counties. Cumberland County is on the Tennessee border in the middle of the state.

Kentucky Medicinal Oil Heritage

Some claim Kentucky oil ended up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1840s, where Samuel Kier sold it as medicine. In the mid-1850s Kier will refine Pennsylvania oil into a his newly invented lamp oil, which he called kerosene.

The well produces oil until about the Civil War. Salt makers will then take over operation of the well – because brine has become the well’s primary output.

Records gathered as part of a centennial celebration in 1929, “documenting the first commercially operated oil well in the United States,” are preserved at the University of Kentucky Special Collections.

Oil was a cure for many ills.

However, another even earlier Kentucky well – drilled for brine in 1818 in what is now the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in McCreary County – also found oil that that was bottled and old for medicinal purposes.

As early as 1815 settlers in Wayne County had abandoned a brine well – because oil ruined it as a source of salt water. Still earlier, in Noble County, Ohio, drillers seeking brine near Caldwell in 1814 discovered oil – which they soaked up with rags, bottled and sold.

The Caldwell chamber of commerce proclaims this to be “the first oil well in America.”

Today in Kentucky, petroleum is produced from 52 out of 102 counties – from rock formations dating from the Cambrian to Pennsylvanian ages. Oil production generally includes the state’s western and south-central region. Most natural gas is produced in eastern counties. Almost 1,000 wells were drilled in 2009 - including 304 “dry holes.”

Drilling for oil – not brine – near Titusville, Pennsylvania, Edwin L. Drake is credited with launching the American petroleum industry on August 27, 1859.

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His 1939 “Oil Fields of Graham” today remains on display in its original Texas oil patch community’s historic U.S. Postal Service building – now a museum.

Born in Memphis, Missouri, on February 22, 1898, Alexandre Hogue will become known for his paintings of southwestern scenes during the Great Depression – including murals of the 1930s petroleum industry. Read the rest of this entry »

During much of the 1920s, a Texas Ranger became well known for strictly enforcing the law in booming oilfield communities and on the border. By 1930, the discovery year of the great East Texas field, he was known as “El Lobo Solo” – the lone wolf – who would bring order to a boomtown famous worldwide.

Manuel Trazazas Gonzaullas was born in 1891 in Cádiz, Spain, to a Spanish father and Canadian mother who were naturalized U.S. citizens. At age 15 he witnessed the murder of his only two brothers and the wounding of his parents when bandits raided their home. Fourteen years later, he joined the Texas Rangers.

“Give Texas more Rangers of the caliber of ‘Lone Wolf’ Gonzaullas and the crime wave we are going through will not be of long duration,” reported the Dallas Morning News in 1934.

“He was a soft-spoken man and his trigger finger was slightly bent,” independent oilman Watson W. Wise characterized him during a 1985 interview in his office in Tyler, Texas. “He always told me it was geared to that .45 of his.”

When Kilgore became “the most lawless town in Texas” after the October 1930 oil boom started, Manuel “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas was the Texas Ranger sent out to tame it, according to Wise, himself a distinguished oilman and philanthropist who moved to Texas in 1925.

Gonzaullas – five feet, nine inches tall, with a scarred face, and no sense of humor – was “a very serious type fella,” Wise noted.

“He was sent out to Pecos one time to stop a riot out there, added Wise. “When he got off the train there was a great posse waiting to greet him, and when they saw he was alone, they said, ‘Where’s all your help Mr. Gonzaullas?’ and he said, ‘There’s only one riot isn’t there?’”

He rode a black stallion named Tony and often sported two pearl-handled, silver-mounted .45 pistols. On his chest was a shining Texas Ranger star. Everybody in Kilgore soon knew he was around. Read the rest of this entry »

“There’s an oil spill every day off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, where oil is seeping naturally from cracks in the seafloor into the ocean,” notes the the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

In 1969, an oil spill from a California offshore platform will lead to creation of the modern environmental movement. Today, some Santa Barbara County residents want to lift the state’s drilling ban – to reduce the relentless flow of the region’s underwater natural oil seeps.

“The techniques, equipment and resources necessary to combat an oil spill of this magnitude did not exist at the time,” notes one expert about the 1969 well blowout.

On January 28, after drilling 3,500 below the ocean floor, a Union Oil Company drilling platform six miles off Santa Barbara, suffered a blowout.

Between 80,000 barrels and 100,000 barrels of oil flowed into the Pacific Ocean and onto beaches, including Summerland – where the U.S. offshore industry began in 1896 with wells drilled from piers.

Problems at the Union Oil platform began when roughnecks began to retrieve the pipe in order to replace a drill bit and pressure became dangerously low,  according to a report by the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

“A natural gas blowout occurred. An initial attempt to cap the hole was successful but led to a tremendous buildup of pressure. The expanding mass created five breaks in an east-west fault on the ocean floor, releasing oil and gas from deep beneath the earth,” UCSB noted. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oil City, Pennsylvania, Oil Exchange incorporated in 1874. In 1877, it was the third largest financial exchange of any kind in America, behind New York and San Francisco.

In a sign of the growing  power of John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil Company brings an end to Pennsylvania’s highly speculative oil trading markets.

On January 23, 1895, the Standard Oil purchasing agency in Oil City notifies independent oil producers it will only buy their oil at a price “as high as the markets of the world will justify” – and not necessarily “the price bid on the oil exchange for certificate oil.” Read the rest of this entry »

Oil scouts like Justus McMullen often braved harsh winters (and sometimes armed guards) to visit well sites. Their intelligence debunked rumors and “demystified” reports about oil wells producing in early oil fields.

In the hard winter of 1888, famed 37-year-old “oil scout” Justus C. McMullen, succumbs to pneumonia – contracted while scouting production data from the Pittsburgh Manufacturers’ Gas Company’s well at Cannonsburg.

McMullen, publisher of the Bradford, Pennsylvania, “Petroleum Age” newspaper, already had contributed much to America’s early petroleum industry as a reliable the oil field detective. Read the rest of this entry »

Petroleum exhibits in Luling’s restored 1885 mercantile store describe n ahistoric 1922 discovery.

In 1924, the Luling oilfield had almost 400 wells producing about 11 million barrels of oil.

Once known as the toughest town in Texas, visitors to Luling on the first Saturday in April now find the streets crowded with families enjoying the “Roughneck BBQ and Chili Cook-Off.”

“Best ribs in the country,” says Reader’s Digest.

Crowds rally again in Luling beginning on the last Thursday in June for the Watermelon Thump Festival – and Seed-Spitting Contest.

The Guinness Book of World Records documents the contest’s still unbeaten distance of 68 feet, 9 and 1/8 inches set in 1989. Read the rest of this entry »

Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum, operated by Lamar University in Beaumont, is a 15-building complex, which re-creates Gladys City, an early 1900s era boomtown on the historic Spindletop oil field. The museum provides services to the public, including school tours, adult group tours, teachers’ workshops – and gusher re-enactments.

The Beaumont, Texas, museum includes 15 buildings of exhibits to educate visitors.

On January 1, 1901, if you asked residents of Beaumont, Texas, what news interested them, they would have said the Galveston Hurricane of September 8 (the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history), or the dawning of a new century.

However, as a southeastern Texas petroleum museum explains, if you asked them after January 10, 1901 – they would have said the great oil gusher on Spindletop Hill.

The Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum in Beaumont tells the story of the Spindletop well, a discovery that created the greatest oil boom in America – exceeding the nation’s first oil discovery well in 1859 in Pennsylvania.

Just as consumer demand for kerosene for lamps was declining in favor of electricity, Americans would soon want far more of another refined petroleum product: gasoline. Within a few decades, new oil companies will pump gasoline into automobiles from “filling stations” across the country.

Once a popular view in Beaumont’s Dixie Hotel: “Spindletop Viewing Her Gusher,” 1903, pastel on linen, by Aaron Arion.

According to museum Curator Christy Marino, Texaco and Gulf got their start in the Beaumont area oilfields. Humble (now ExxonMobil) began at the at the nearby town of Humble.

Also known as the “Lucas Gusher” after Captain Anthony F. Lucas, a mining engineer who drilled on a hill, the oilfield produced 3.59 million barrels in its first year and an incredible 17.4 million barrels the next.

The discovery near the southeastern Texas Gulf Coast defied predictions of other earth scientists.

As a result of Spindletop, “Christmas trees” to control oil wells became commonplace in the industry. The Texas discovery “changed the way people would live all over the world,” proclaimed Houston oilman Michel T. Halbouty in 1952. “It revived the industrial revolution…caused the United States to become a world power…(and) revolutionized transportation through the automobile industry.”

Texas oil production also would help bring an end to John D. Rockefeller’s oil monopolies. In 1936 – fifteen years after Lucas died – the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (founded in 1871) began awarding its Anthony F. Lucas Medal to recognize “distinguished achievements in improving the technique and practice of finding and producing petroleum.”

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Spindletop creates the modern oil and natural gas industry, changes the future of American industry and transportation – and brings many new oilfield technologies.

The discovery well’s story – which popularizes rotary drilling technology – begins more than a decade earlier when the Gladys City Oil, Gas & Manufacturing Company is formed by Patillo Higgins. Higgins, a one-armed mechanic and self-taught geologist, is one of the few at the time who believes U.S. industries will soon switch fuels from coal to oil.

The Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum in Beaumont, Texas, tells the story of one of America’s greatest petroleum discoveries, the “Lucas Gusher” of January 10, 1901. The Spindletop field will produce more oil in one day than the rest of the world’s oilfields combined.

Higgins is convinced that the “Big Hill” four miles south of Beaumont has oil — despite conventional wisdom to the contrary. Through the latter half of the 19th century, Pennsylvania had been the most oil-productive state in the country, notes an article by the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI). Texas had produced only minor amounts of oil, starting with a well in 1866 drilled by Lyne T. Barret near the East Texas town of Nacogdoches.

Patillo Higgins forms the Gladys City Oil, Gas & Manufacturing Company on August 24, 1892.

Formed over millions of years, the hill near Beaumont is the result of a giant underground dome of salt that moved towards the surface, explains the article. Higgins had a feeling that drilling a well on top of this salt dome would produce oil.

“The Texas press, as well as the local geologists, had been very skeptical of Higgins for years, and no one in the area believed that a salt dome structure could produce oil,” the article says.

The Gladys City Oil, Gas & Manufacturing Company drills wells on Spindletop in 1893, 1895 and 1896. All are dry holes.

Higgins, who will leave the venture, hires a Croatian mining engineer. Anthony Lucas (Antun Lucic, born in 1855). Lucas has studied at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria, and served as a captain in the Austrian navy. He recently has been a salt miner in Louisiana.

Capt. Anthony Lucas, a Croatian mining engineer and former officer in the Austrian navy.

I  went to Beaumont, Texas, about seventy miles west of Lafayette. There I was attracted by an elevation, then known locally as Big Hill, although this hill amounted merely to a mound rising only twelve feet above the level of the prairie.

This mound attracted my attention on account of its contour, which indicated possibilities for an incipient dome below, and because at the apex of it there were exudations of sulphuretted hydrogen gas. — Capt. Lucas quote from an article by Adam S. Eterovich.

Lucas contacts famed Pennsylvania oilman John Galey and his partner James Guffey, who had drilled marginally successful wells in nearby Corsicana in 1896. Galey and Guffey had returned to Pennsylvania, convinced that there was little future in Texas oil.

“Lucas turned to Guffey and Galey, who had left the area three years earlier,” the PRI article continues. “Something made them change their minds, and in 1900, John Galey returned to Beaumont, Texas, to survey the area. He picked the spot, and the drilling began on October 27, 1900.”

Technological advances from drilling at Spindletop “paved the way for other oil producing states like California to increase their production.” Early major oil companies like Texaco, Gulf, Mobile, Humble and Sun Oil trace their roots to the “Big Hill.”

Drilling is difficult at first. “There is little in the way of rock at the surface in that part of the world. Instead, oil wildcatters had to drill through several hundred feet of sand,” the article notes. “This made the hole prone to cave in on them. To help solve this problem, one of Lucas’s drillers, Curt Hamill, came up with a solution that was revolutionary at the time.”

Instead of pumping water down the hole to flush out the cuttings produced by the action of the drill, Hamill used mud. “This proved to help not only in retrieving the cuttings, but just as importantly, it was found that the mud stuck to the sides of the hole and kept it from caving in, explains the PRI article. “It was found there were even more benefits, and mud has been used in almost every drill hole around the world ever since.”

“On this spot on the tenth day of the twentieth century a new era in civilization began,” notes an inscription on the 25-foot-tall monument erected in 1941 — and today part of the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum’s outdoor exhibits.

The “Lucas Gusher” will erupt more than 150 feet into the air. It begins flowing at an astounding 100,000 barrels per day from a depth of 1,010 feet. I

This is the first discovery of the prolific salt dome structures along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The well is not brought under control for nine days, losing an estimated 850,000 barrels of oil. According to PRI, a new device – now called a “Christmas Tree” – is invented on the spot to control the flow of oil.

The Spindletop field will soon produce more oil in one day than all the rest of the world’s oilfields combined. In its first year alone Spindletop produced 3.59 million barrels of oil — climbing to 17.4 million by its second year. The huge amount of oil causes the price of oil to drop from $2 to less than 25 cents a barrel. Texaco, Gulf, Mobile, Humble and Sun oil companies can trace their roots to the Big Hill.

“Technological advances engineered in Texas during this early period paved the way for other oil producing states like California to increase their production,” concludes Vintage Oil, a website that sells photographs.

“Fishtail drilling bits gave way to the Hughes Tool rotary rock bit.” the site adds. “The movers and shakers of the oil industry converged on Houston in the early 1900s and the city still reigns today as the energy capital of the world.”

The Spindletop discovery “affected the entire world,” proclaims Michel T. Halbouty, a legendary Houston oilman who co-authored the 1952 book Spindletop: the True Story of the Oil Discovery That Changed the World.

“It changed the way people would live all over the world,” Halbouty explains. “It revived the industrial revolution, which had been dead for a while. It caused the United States to become a world power. It revolutionized transportation through the automobile industry. It started the Liquid Fuel Age, the greatest age in the history of the world.”

Two Beaumont museums tell the story of the Spindletop discovery — and today’s role of the petroleum industry in America’s economic development. Visit the Texas Energy Museum and the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — where educational water-gusher demonstrations occur.

Read about salt domes in “Offshore Oil History.” Learn more about Texas exploration history in “First Lone Star Discovery.”

Please support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society with a donation.

Surrounded by 20 acres of woodlands, the Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources, seven miles north of El Dorado – in equally historic Smackover – exhibits the state’s petroleum history.

When the Busey-Armstrong No. 1 well struck oil on January 10, 1921, it catapulted the population of nearby El Dorado, Arkansas, from 4,000 to 25,000.

“Twenty-two trains a day were soon running in and out of El Dorado,” noted the Arkansas Gazette as the state legislature announced plans for a special legislative railway excursion to visit the oil well in Union County.

H.L. Hunt arrived with a borrowed $50 and joined the lease traders and speculators at the Garrett Hotel – where fortunes were being made and lost. Hunt will get his start as an oilman in El Dorado and make his fortune a decade later in East Texas.

Located on a hill a little over a mile southwest of El Dorado, the derrick was plainly visible from the town, according to A. R. and R. B. Buckalew in their The Discovery of Oil in South Arkansas, 1920-1924.

The Buckalews explain that three “gassers” had been completed in the general vicinity but had produced no oil in commercial quantity. Read the rest of this entry »

Ferne Houseknecht proudly holds a plaque commemorating the oil well on her dairy farm. The Houseknecht No. 1 well of January 7, 1957, revealed a giant, 29-miles-long oil field — the largest in Michigan.

The story of the discovery of Michigan’s only giant oil field is the stuff of dreams and legends, says one historian.

After decades of dry holes or small oil discoveries, the Houseknecht No. 1 discovery well of January 7, 1957, reveals a 29-miles-long oil and natural gas field.

It takes more than two years of drilling, but the Houseknecht No. 1 well discovers Michigan’s largest oil field – the “Golden Gulch” Albion-Pulaski-Scipio Field.

The 3,576-foot-deep well near Scipio Township in Hillsdale County in southwestern Michigan produces from the Black River formation of the Trenton zone.

Local lore says that the well’s namesake, Ferne Houseknecht, had been told by a spiritualist that there was oil under her farm.

She convinced her uncle, Clifford Perry, to help drill a well one joint of pipe at a time between other farm projects.

“The story of the discovery well of Michigan’s only ‘giant’ oil field, using the worldwide definition of having produced more than 100 million barrels of oil from a single contiguous reservoir is the stuff of dreams, and of oil field legends,” explains Michigan historian and author Jack Westbrook. Read the rest of this entry »

“Michigan Oil & Gas History,” a 2005 Clarke Historical Library exhibit at Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant.

In 1860, Michigan State Geologist Alexander Winchell reported that oil and natural gas deposits lay under Michigan’s surface. First commercial production was at Port Huron, where twenty-two wells were drilled, beginning in 1886.

Total output was small. Michigan’s first oil boom was at Saginaw, where production began about 1925. About three hundred wells were drilled here by 1927, when Muskegon’s “Discovery Well” drew oil men from all over the country to that field.

The Mt. Pleasant field, opened in 1928, helped make Michigan one of the leading oil producers of the eastern United States. Mount Pleasant became known as the “Oil Capital of Michigan.” Efforts of the industry itself resulted in excellent state laws regulating petroleum output. Well depths ranged from one thousand to six thousand feet. Read the rest of this entry »

A handful of America’s earliest oilmen met in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and agreed that henceforth, 42 gallons would constitute a “barrel” of oil. It was August 1866 and Pennsylvania led the world in oil production. Read the rest of this entry »

Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler has the greatest number of panoramic or “Birds-Eye View” maps in the collection of the Library of Congress. Lithographs of his cartography (done without a balloon) fascinated the public of America’s Victorian Age.

More than 400 Thaddeus Fowler panoramas have been identified. There are 324 in the Library of Congress, including Oil City, Pennsylvania. Source: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C.

Panoramic maps were a popular cartographic form used to depict U.S. towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interestingly, many of what Fowler called “aero views” captured the small cities near America’s earliest oil and natural gas fields.

T.M. Fowler published this Titusville, Pennsylvania, panorama in 1896. An oil discovery along the banks of Oil Creek by Edwin Drake on August 27, 1859, launched the American petroleum Industry.

Fowler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on December 21, 1842. He served in the 21st New York Volunteers in 1861 – was wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run a year later – and discharged at Boston in 1863. Read the rest of this entry »

In October 1917, the McClesky No. 1 well started the Ranger oilfield boom in North Texas. In just 20 months, the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company — whose stock had skyrocketed from $30 to $1,250 a share — was drilling 22 wells in the area. Eight refineries were open or under construction, and the city’s four banks had $5 million in deposits.

Read the rest of this entry »

The luck of John Washington Steele begins on December 10, 1844, when Culbertson and Sarah McClintock adopt him as an infant.

John Washington Steele of Venango County, Pennsylvania

Johnny Steele – who will one day will be known as “Coal Oil Johnny” – is adopted along with his sister, Permelia. The McClintocks bring them home to their farm on the banks of Oil Creek in Venango County, Pennsylvania.

Fifteen years later, the petroleum boom prompted by Edwin Drake’s discovery – America’s first commercial oil well – will make the widow McClintock a fortune in royalties.

When Mrs. McClintock dies in a kitchen fire in 1864, she leaves the money to her only surviving child, Johnny. At age 20, he inherits $24,500 and his mother’s 200-acre farm along Oil Creek between what is now Rynd Farm and Rouseville. The farm includes 20 producing wells yielding $2,800 in royalties a day.

“Coal Oil Johnny” Steele will earn his name in 1865 after such a legendary year of extravagance that years later the New York Times will report: “In his day, Steele was the greatest spender the world had ever known…he threw away $3,000,000 in less than a year.” Read the rest of this entry »

Since 1896, when the first commercial oil well was drilled in Bartlesville, many historic Oklahoma oilfields have been discovered: Glennpool, Cushing, Three Sands, Healdton, Oklahoma City and others – including 20 “giants.” Few have had the tremendous economic impact as the late 1920s oilfields of the greater Seminole area. 

Prosperity brought traffic jams to Seminole, Oklahoma, in the mid-1920s when newly discovered oilfields “swung the United States’ oil inventory from scarcity to surplus.” Photo courtesy the Oklahoma Oil Museum.

A July 16, 1926, discovery well near Seminole, Oklahoma, revealed the massive potential of an oil producing formation, the Wilcox sand –  and launched a drilling boom that will make Oklahoma one of today’s leading producing states. The Fixico No. 1 well penetrated the Wilcox sand at 4,073 feet.

By 1935, the oilfields around Seminole became the largest supplier of oil in the world. More than 60 petroleum reservoirs were found in 1,300 square miles of east-central Oklahoma – and six were “giants,” producing more than million barrels of oil each. Read the rest of this entry »

Students visit the Norman No. 1 Well Museum in Neodesha, Kansas, to learn about the November 28, 1892, gusher — and about their state’s modern petroleum industry. Oil or natural gas is produced in 89 of 105 counties.

After 22 days of drilling near Neodesha, Kansas, the Norman No. 1 well comes in.

This November 28, 1892, oil discovery is considered by many to be America’s first significant oil well west of the Mississippi River.

Beginning as just a four-barrel-a day producer from 832 feet deep, this Kansas discovery is the first to uncover production from the Mid-Continent region, which includes oil and natural fields extending into Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.

“Norman No. 1 was the first oil well west of the Mississippi River to produce a commercial quantity of oil,” explains one historian.

“This major oil discovery ushered in a new era for Neodesha and the state. By 1904, Kansas was producing four million barrels of crude oil per year and, in 1925, ranked fifth among the states in oil production,” notes the Kansas Historical Society. Read the rest of this entry »

By 1920, Tulsa is home to 400 petroleum companies, two daily newspapers, seven banks, four telegraph companies – and more than 10,000 telephones.

On a chilly fall morning in 1905 – two years before Oklahoma becomes a state – oil is discovered on the Glenn farm south of Tulsa.

Soon, there are hundreds of wells producing so much oil that the land is called the “‘Glenn Pool,” now the Tulsa suburb Glenpool.

This November 22 discovery well will help make Tulsa the “Oil Capital of the World.”

With daily production soon exceeding 120,000 barrels, Glenn Pool exceeds Tulsa County’s earlier “Red Fork Gusher” – and the giant Spindletop discovery near Beaumont, Texas, four years earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1878, two brothers will discover a massive natural gas field, help bring a new energy resource to Pittsburgh – and lay the foundation for several modern petroleum companies.

Like many young men of their time, Michael Haymaker and his younger brother Obediah left their Westmoreland County farm to seek their fortunes in Pennsylvania’s booming petroleum industry. Read the rest of this entry »

“A woman with a genius for affairs – it may sound paradoxical, but the fact exists. If Mrs. Emma A. Summers were less than a genius she could not, as she does today, control the Los Angeles oil markets.”  – The San Francisco Call, July 21, 1901

She would become a lady to be reckoned with in the rough and tumble world of the Los Angeles oil patch.

Emma Summers’ “genius for affairs” put her in control of the Los Angeles City oilfield’s production and earned her oil queen title.

Emma A. (McCutchen) Summers, a refined southern lady who graduated from Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, moved to Los Angeles in 1893 to teach piano. She was soon caught up in the excitement of California’s new petroleum exploration industry.

With her home not far from where Edward Doheny had discovered the Los Angeles City field just a year before, Summers invested $700 for half interest in a well just a few blocks from Doheny’s producer.

Her well was between Court and Temple Streets, about a mile west of today’s Dodger Stadium. It didn’t go well. The casing collapsed and tools were lost, but she persevered. She borrowed another $1,800 to continue drilling the well and “Night after night, by the light of a flaring torch, she hovered over it, as if it were a sick babe’s cradle.”

Weeks dragged on as the money dwindled, but the well finally came in. Encouraged, Summers drilled another well, and another, and another. She later recalled, “When I found myself $10,000 in debt, I thought if I ever got that paid and as much more in the bank, I would be glad to quit.”

But she didn’t quit. Summers became a constant presence in the forest of oil rigs that had turned the heart of Los Angeles into a “vibrant, oil-soaked little canyon.” The population doubled between 1890 and 1900 and her oil business prospered. Read the rest of this entry »

The Iowa 80 Trucking Museum was a dream of Bill Moon, who founded the Iowa 80 truck stop.

The Iowa 80 Trucking Museum collection was started by Iowa 80 Truckstop founder Bill Moon – who had a passion for trucks. He always looked for a unique truck or trucking artifacts to add to his collection.

There are now more than 100 antique trucks on display at Moon’s museum, which hosts an annual jamboree.

Every summer, this museum outside Walcott, Iowa, hosts a variety of events for truckers and other travelers, teachers, students – and transportation history buffs.

The museum, which expanded in March 2012, offers a free app for iPhones and Androids offering audio narratives of its exhibits.

The innovation – increasingly popular among museums – allows both virtual and actual visitors to scan and download detailed exhibit information.

The audio, narrated by museum curator Dave Meier, provides additional details about each truck that is not necessarily found on exhibit signs. Visitors at the museum can simply scan a “QR” code at the welcome desk to download the app. Virtual visitors can download it from the website. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1883, tales of a fabled “tar spring” may have inspired a wildcatter – Pennsylvanian Mike Murphy – to drill Wyoming’s first oil well.

A Salt Creek, Wyoming, oil boom begins in 1908. Production continues today thanks to new technologies.

In 1837, Washington Irving published The Adventures of Captain Bonneville: or, Scenes beyond the Rocky Mountains of the Far West. Eastern readers were spellbound by Capt. Benjamin Bonneville’s four-year expedition, encounters with Indians, and detailed accounts of life on the fur-trapping trail.

In the unforgiving lands that would one day become the Wyoming Territory, Bonneville traveled down the Popo Agie River and in 1832 made note of a natural resource that would one day bring a new industry to the state of Wyoming:

“In this neighborhood, the captain made search for ‘the great Tar Spring,’ one of the wonders of the mountains, the medicinal properties of which he had heard extravagantly lauded by the trappers. After a toilsome search, he found it at the foot of a sand-bluff, a little east of the Wind River Mountains, where it exuded in a small stream of the color and consistency of tar. Read the rest of this entry »

Among its records for dry holes, Florida’s first – but certainly not last – unsuccessful attempt to find commercially viable oil reserves began in 1901, not far from the Gulf Coast panhandle town of Pensacola.

Florida’s first oil well’s site is by present day Big Cypress Preserve in southwest Florida, about a 30 minute drive from the resort city of Naples — where a museum exhibit describes the discovery.

Two test wells were drilled, the first to 1,620 feet and the second a hundred feet deeper. Both were abandoned. Whether that wildcatter was following science or intuition, contemporary accounts of his efforts reveal only a small historical footnote: “Florida’s first dry holes.”

Twenty years later, as America’s oil demand continued to soar, oil still had not been found in Florida. The state’s panhandle still looked promising – despite a growing list of failed drilling ventures.

Indian legends and a wildcat stock promoter’s claim of oil inspired yet another attempt near today’s Falling Waters Park, about 100 miles east of Pensacola. A tall, wooden derrick and steam-driven rig were used to drill.

At a depth 3,900 feet, a brief showing of natural gas excited area residents with a false report of a possible gusher. Undeterred, the oilmen continued to drill to a depth of 4,912 feet before finally giving up.

No oil of commercial quantity was found and the well was capped in 1921. Another dry hole. Read the rest of this entry »

In December 1859, less than four months after Edwin Drake’s celebrated discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, a similarly determined wildcatter named Lyne (Lynis) Taliaferro Barret began searching in an East Texas area known as Oil Springs. His interest in finding this newly prized commodity was no doubt prompted by its lucrative $20 a barrel selling price — and his certainty that Texan oil was waiting for him.

Indians and early East Texas settlers had long known the Oil Springs area for its seepage and used the crude for its purported medicinal benefit for both themselves and their livestock. Invention of the kerosene-burning lamp prompted immediate demand for “illuminating oil” and inspired a boom in drilling and speculation across the country. Barret was eager to profit from the new opportunity.

In 1859, Lyne Taliaferro Barret leased 279 acres east of Nacogdoches, Texas, near Oil Springs -- an area known for oil seeps. After the Civil War he drilled his first oil well. On September 12, 1866, his tenacity was rewarded when the No. 1 Isaac C. Skillern well struck oil at a depth of 106 feet.

Barret joined the chase for oil, but prudently continued to operate his successful mercantile partnership in Melrose, Texas. Read the rest of this entry »

Travelers on U.S. 62 four miles south of the Allegheny River Bridge at Tidioute, Pennsylvania, discover this Warren County roadside marker erected in July 1959.

Few remember the names of those who come in second — they often are relegated to the “also rans,” no matter how close to the finish. Petroleum history is the same.

Second-place finishers most often dwell in the fine print of history. Consider America’s first oil well.

Edwin L. Drake drilled his famous well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. As a result, the Drake Well Museum today draws thousands of visitors each year. The discovery’s 2009 sesquicentennial was commemorated in the “valley that changed the world.”

August 27, 1859, marks the date of America’s first oil well. But August 31 – just four days later – is ignored. It was on that day that a second oil well was drilled by a young man named John Livingston Grandin.

A few days after “Drake’s Folly” at Titusville surprised everybody by producing barrels of oil from a depth of 69.5 feet, the news arrived in Tidioute’s General Store, 20 miles away. Each barrel was said to be selling for 75 cents and 23-year-old John Grandin, the owner’s son and an aspiring entrepreneur, saw an opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »

A wildcat well comes in on S. L. Fowler’s farm near a small North Texas community on July 29, 1918. The subsequent drilling boom along the Red River will make Burkburnett famous – two decades before “Boom Town,” the 1940 motion picture it inspires.

“Burkburnett was a sleepy farm town that transformed into a ‘Boom Town’ as a result of the North Texas oil boom in 1918,” explains the Burkburnett Historical Society. A popular 1940 MGM movie results from an article in Cosmopolitan magazine.

At the time of the Fowler No. 1 well’s discovery, future moviestar Clark Gable is a teenage roustabout in an Oklahoma oilfield. The well is completed at the northeastern edge of Burkburnett, founded in 1907 — and named by President Theodore Roosevelt, who two years earlier hunted wolf along the Red River with rancher Burk Burnett. Read the rest of this entry »

With exhibits collected over five decades by Francis “F.T.” Sr., the Felty Outdoor Oil Museum of Burkburnett, Texas, displays machinery from the height of a 1918 North Texas oil boom. Portable cable-tool spudders are watched over by museum founder’s son, F.T. Felty, Jr., an independent oil and gas producer.

Francis “F.T.” Felty Jr., stands by a photograph of himself — playing on one of his father’s drilling rigs.

Three generations of the Felty family have kicked historic Burkburnett oil field mud from their boots.

The first, Francis “F.T.” Felty Sr., worked in Wichita County through the revival of a North Texas drilling boom during World War Two. Responding to the war’s steel shortages, he crisscrossed the oil patch in a truck – pulling used casings. It turned into a long career in the oil patch.

When the senior Felty moved from salvaging and began drilling in the 1970s, it was within sight of the historic 1918 Burkburnett discovery well. He had begun collecting old oil field equipment in the 1950s – and a lot of rocks, says his son, Francis “F.T.” Felty Jr., the owner of the F.T. Felty Operating Company Read the rest of this entry »

“Sometimes, when researching history, you find places where it’s still alive. My search for the Tin Man’s mythic oil-can led me to such a spot. L. Frank Baum sold cans of buggy wheel oil for a living as the co-owner of Baum’s Castorine Company of Syracuse, New York.” -  Oz historian Evan L. Schwartz.

The future world-famous author of the children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz once sold petroleum products in Syracuse, New York. In 1883, L. Frank Baum and his brother Benjamin launched a small business offering lubricants, oils, greases – and “Baum’s Castorine, the great axle oil.”

L. Frank Baum — whose father found great success in Pennsylvania oilfields — would serve as chief salesman for Baum’s Castorine Company, which he founded with his brother on July 9, 1883, but sold only a few years later. The petroleum products company today operates in Rome, New York.

Reporting on the July 9, 1883, opening, the Syracuse Daily Courier newspaper noted that Baum’s Castorine was a rust-resistant axle grease concoction for machinery, buggies, and wagons. The grease was advertised to be “so smooth it makes the horses laugh.” Read the rest of this entry »

Signal Hill circa 1930 – at the corner of 1st Street and Belmont Street. Photo courtesy of the Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.

In the summer of 1921, one of the world’s most famous wells strikes oil on the southeast side of Signal Hill, 20 miles south of Los Angeles. On June 23, Alamitos No. 1 well erupts “black gold,” announcing the discovery of California’s prolific Long Beach oilfield.

The natural gas pressure is so great that the gusher rises 114 feet. The well produces almost 600 barrels a day when it is completed on June 25. It will eventually produce 700,000 barrels. The oilfield it reveals still produces 1.5 million barrels of oil every year.

Signal Hill, incorporated three years after the Alamitos discovery well, remains the only city in America completely surrounded by another city – Long Beach. More than one billion barrels of oil have been pumped from the Long Beach oilfield since the original strike. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1958, the University of Texas Board of Regents moved the Santa Rita No. 1 well’s walking beam and other equipment to the Austin campus. After the dedication, the student newspaper described the well “as one that made the difference between pine-shack classrooms and modern buildings.”

The vast Permian Basin, once known as a “petroleum graveyard,” has been producing since 1923. The discovery well, Santa Rita No. 1, brought wildcatters who followed it from most of West Texas into the southeastern corner of New Mexico.

Near Big Lake, Texas – on arid land leased from the University of Texas – Texon Oil and Land Company struck oil on May 28, 1923, after 21 months of cable-tool drilling that averaged less than five feet a day. Read the rest of this entry »

Building a community oil museum is not for the faint of heart.

“Money and volunteers, volunteers and money,” are the biggest challenges, according to John Larrabee, board president for the Illinois Oil Field Museum and Resource Center on the outskirts of his hometown of Oblong, Illinois.

The Illinois Oil Field Museum is located in Oblong, Illinois, on Highway 33, southeast of Effingham. First opened in 1961, the community museum moved into a new building in 2001 and today continues to add new exhibits.

“The first thing you have to have is a goal and the determination to keep at it, no matter what. Don’t give up, whatever happens,” Larrabee explained in a 2004 interview with historical society Contributing Editor Kris Wells.

It helps to know something about the oil business, said the third generation Illinois Basin oilman. “The museum began way back in 1961 with a fellow named Enos Bloom, Larrabee noted. “In those days, the city of Oblong provided and maintained a building that housed donated artifacts.” Read the rest of this entry »

The petroleum industry supplies America with an amazing variety of products that are often “hiding in plain sight.” For Binney & Smith Company, common oilfield paraffin changed the company’s destiny by coloring children’s imaginations.

Dustless chalk circa 1904.

Although they longed for color, students in Alice Stead Binney’s classroom had to settle for dustless chalk. An-Du-Septic dustless chalk was so popular among turn-of-the-century teachers that it won a Gold Medal at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Teachers like Alice loved the tidy new product, but their choices were limited. Pencils of the day were primitive, with square “leads” made from a variety of clays, slates, and graphite. Color writing implements were the toxic and expensive imports of artists, best kept away from schoolchildren.

Alice’s husband Edwin, and his cousin, C. Harold Smith, created the award-winning An-Du-Septic chalk as a consequence of expanding their pigment business into the sideline production of slate pencils for schools. In Easton, Pennsylvania, the Binney & Smith Company (formerly Peekskill Chemical Works) was best known for its production of red iron oxide and carbon black for paints, inks, and stove and shoe polishes.

Carbon Black & Paraffin Crayons

Fifth-grade artist in Bolivar, New York, used an oil product, paraffin-based crayons, to illustrate oil production. Image courtesy the Pioneer Oil Museum in Bolivar.

The Binney & Smith 1891 patent for an “Apparatus for the Manufacture of Carbon Black” detailed production of the fine, soot-like substance that was more intensely black than any other pigment in use at the time.

The booming Pennsylvania petroleum industry supplied oil and natural gas feedstock for the company’s carbon black, which would win an award at the 1900 Paris Exposition.

Binney & Smith mixed their carbon black with oilfield paraffin and other waxes to introduce a paper-wrapped black crayon marker for crates and barrels. It was promoted as being able to “stay on all” and accordingly named Staonal. The popular product is still sold today.

Staonal was a success, but too laden with carbon black to be safe for use by children. Slate pencils and the very successful An-Du-Septic dustless chalk nonetheless put Binney & Smith salesmen into America’s classrooms. The sales force listened to teachers and learned there would be a ready market for inexpensive, non-toxic, brightly colored crayons.

Binney and Smith produced the first box of eight Crayola crayons in 1903 — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, brown, and black.

By 1903, Binney & Smith was ready to launch a new product that would change childhood forever. Alice Binney provided the historic name by combining the French word for chalk, craie with an English adjective meaning oily, oleaginous — Crayola®.

Manufacturing was based on small batches of carefully measured and hand-mixed pigments, paraffin, talc and other waxes. Paper labels were individually rolled by hand and pasted onto each crayon. The finished products were hand packed into individual boxes and shipped in wooden crates. Sixteen Crayola crayons sold for 10 cents; eight for 5 cents: red, yellow, orange, green, blue, violet, black, and brown. Crayola was an instant hit.

The company’s proprietary formulas remain a closely guarded secret as demand for its crayons has continued to grow around the world. Paraffin from distant petroleum refineries is now delivered to Crayola’s Easton, Pennsylvania, factory in railroad tank cars. Production capacity is more than four million crayons every day.

Crayola has grown to become a $500 million dollar a year business — a successful union of the petroleum industry to the colorful world of children’s imaginations.

The Crayola Factory Museum.

On January 1, 2007, Binney & Smith™, maker of Crayola® crayons and markers, became Crayola LLC in recognition of the company’s number one brand. The company is now known as Crayola.

“This organizational and name change showcases the company’s Crayola brand, sold by Binney Binney & Smith since 1903,” explains the company, which operates a museum in Easton. “The Crayola name has 99 percent recognition among U.S. consumer households, is sold in more than 80 different countries and represents innovation, fun, kids and quality.”

Editor’s Note – In 1912, Binney & Smith’s carbon black is used for the first time to make black tires…

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The tires of this 1904 Oldsmobile Model N Touring Runabout were not chosen for their color. Until B.F. Goodrich introduced “carbon black” into the vulcanizing process in 1910, automobile tires were white.

Carbon Black Hits the Road

Bankrupt Philadelphia hardware merchant and erstwhile inventor Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped rubber and sulfur on a hot stovetop in 1839. The rubber charred like leather yet remained elastic, a discovery that led to “vulcanization.”

With the new process, natural rubber could be transformed into an industrial product with innumerable uses. Goodyear’s famous lawyer, Daniel Webster, proclaimed of his client’s invention, “It introduces quite a new material into the manufacture of the arts, that material being nothing less than elastic metal.”

Automobile tires were the ideal application for this new product. Between 1895 and 1905, more than 77,000 new automobiles were registered in the United State. The maxi-mum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph, and automobile tires were white. Natural rubber pigments and zinc oxide used in the manufacturing process gave tires their color.

In 1910, the B.F. Goodrich Company found that adding “carbon black” to the vulcanizing process dramatically improved strength and durability.

Carbon black, which looks like soot, is produced by controlled combustion of petroleum products, both oil and natural gas. Its use in tires created an immense market – initially consuming one pound of carbon black for each two pounds of rubber.

As the automobile industry grew, so did demand for tires and for carbon black. By 1931, Texas was producing more than 200 million pounds of carbon black annually from just 31 plants – 75 percent of America’s total. Substantial quantities of carbon black were used in the manufacture of pigments, inks, and paints.

Today, most of America’s carbon black is still produced in Texas and Louisiana. Demand remains closely associated with automobile tires. Cabot Corp., founded in Pennsylvania in 1882, is America’s largest producer of carbon black, with 25 manufacturing plants in 19 countries and revenues of more than $2 billion. Worldwide carbon black needs for tire manufacturing alone are forecast to be more than 13 billion pounds in 2008.

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This section of the society’s energy education contacts begins with petroleum-related programs of the U.S. government, including a list of federal resources for teachers, students and industry researchers. Also see our list of State Energy Education Contacts.

Read the rest of this entry »

An updated state-by-state list of resources and contacts for teachers, students and researchers. Also see our list of National Energy Education Contacts.

This collection of state contacts offers education programs (designed for grades kindergarten through 12th grade) with emphasis on oil and natural gas exploration and production. It is a research product of the American Oil & Gas Historical Society — as a service to society members and supporters.

Contact the society and support its energy education mission.

When petroleum leaves the wellhead and reaches a refinery, it has moved into what is considered the “downstream” segment of the industry. Information about the “upstream” segment (exploration and production) is available from sources — in the oil and natural gas producing states.

Since 1930, the Independent Petroleum Association of American has published an annual magazine containing detailed statistics — including drilling, production, prices and financial information, operating rotary rigs, and much more.

For a collection of individual state geological surveys in all 50 states, visit theAssociation of American State Geologists. Many of the following resources are documented from updated information of the U.S. Department of Energy’s booklet Energy Education Resources: Kindergarten through 12th Grade – edited to narrow scope to oil and natural gas. Read the rest of this entry »