With a collection of more than three million artifacts, the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., today exhibits surprisingly few relating to America’s petroleum exploration and production industry. It wasn’t always so.

Tulsa will recover the forgotten “Panorama of Petroleum” mural – thanks to the city’s Gilcrease Museum. In 1998, the mural is restored and installed at the Tulsa International Airport, where it remains today.

In June 1967, a massive “Hall of Petroleum” opened at the Smithsonian Institution’s museum on the national mall. The exhibit featured many exploration and production technological advancements – and the resulting onshore and offshore discoveries considered essential to development of U.S. energy resources.

Although it once featured a “Hall of Petroleum,” today’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., does not exhibit any oil or natural gas exploration and production technologies.

Visitors to the Hall of Petroleum – in what became the National Museum of American History in 1980 – were greeted by a 13-foot by 56-foot mural painted by artist Delbert Jackson (1915-1982), a well known Tulsa, Oklahoma, artist and illustrator.

Jackson spent two years creating the painting, which portrays oil exploration, production, refining, and delivery. His “Panorama of Petroleum” featured the faces of 22 Tulsa oilmen.

The mural, which served as a key to the equipment contents of the museum’s Hall of Petroleum, today is on permanent display at Tulsa International Airport.

In 1967, “Panorama of Petroleum,” a 56-foot mural by Delbert Jackson, welcomed visitors to a Smithsonian Institution museum on the national mall. Today it is on display in the Tulsa International Airport.

The Jackson mural includes several Tulsa oilmen preparing to make down-hole measurements — after installing a “Christmas tree” that consists of a series of valves to regulate the flow from the well.

The hall’s main exhibits were prepared with “the best available technical advice to give the public some conception of the involved nature of the processes of finding and producing oil and its preparation for consumption – whether by automobiles, airplanes, power stations, household furnaces, or the petrochemical industry,” explains Philip W. Bishop, author of the exhibit’s catalogue, Petroleum.

“If the hall can increase the public’s knowledge of and respect for the technical skill and know-how of those who make this energy available, it will have served its purpose,” he adds.

Noting that in front of the mural stands a rotary drilling rig used originally to drill water wells in Texas and, later, to drill shallow oil wells, Bishop describes the exhibit’s “horse-powered machine called the Corsicana rig” – believed to be one of the oldest surviving examples of a rotary drilling rig.

“Adjacent to the introductory mural is a large relief map of the United States, which shows the statistical growth of the industry, including crude oil and natural gas production and proved reserves,” he continues.

“A comparison of the columns on the map provides dramatic evidence of the advancement of oil-finding technology especially after the doldrums of the 1920s when scientists – including those of the Smithsonian Institution – were confidently, if despondently, forecasting the exhaustion of America’s oil resources within a few year,” he adds.

Although not on display, a “gravimeter,” is among National Museum of American History’s collection. The device once measured gravitational anomalies associated with petroleum deposits. Geologists of the 1930s found them more rugged and easier to manage than the earlier gravity pendulums and torsion balances.

Bishop’s extensive catalogue of the Petroleum Hall’s exhibits – now long since dispersed or in storage – includes the evolution of geological knowledge in the early oil regions and the development of anticline theory, first advanced in 1860 but not immediately accepted.

Another section on exploring for oil shows how geophysicists locate areas for further exploration by drilling. “Here, the detailed review of the industry’s technology begins,” he adds.

Exhibits describe drilling and completion technologies; increasing production by stimulation of the well by artificial means; lifting oil to the surface; refining methods; natural gas and petrochemicals; distribution of petroleum products to the consumer; and transportation – including the evolution of oil tankers “using models of tankers showing growth of the typical unit from the 1890s to the present.”

Realistic scenes in Delbert Jackson’s mural serve as a key to the exhibits of Hall of Petroleum. The painting features the faces of 22 leading Tulsa oilmen — and the artist himself as a roughneck, at right.

A section call “Exploring by Drilling” reveals how “a well in an area not previously drilled for oil or known to have produced it is called a ‘wildcat.’ The catalogue continues:

The place where drilling is started is usually determined by surveys which reveal likely geologic deviations. However convincing this exploratory data, the drilling of a wildcat is full of risk. In 1966, for example, 90 percent of such wells drilled in the United States proved to be dry holes — a sufficient indication of the difficulties in discovering the formation which does contain oil.

Noting an alternative entrance to the hall’s Delbert Jackson mural, Bishop says it “brings one to a detailed scale model of a modern rotary-drilling rig and to a brief history of the development of the gasoline dispensing pump, culminating in a modern blending pump.”

When the Hall of Petroleum exhibit closes, the mural is put into storage  for three decades. The city of Tulsa will recover “Panorama of Petroleum,” thanks to its Gilcrease Museum, and in 1998 the mural is restored and installed at the Tulsa International Airport.

Today, thousands of travelers view the painting en route to their gates. Plaques provide a numbered “who’s who” of the Oklahoma oilmen in the mural. For airport visitors who look closely, Jackson can be found in the background – pictured as a roughneck.

Editor’s Note – ExxonMobil is among the sponsors of a current Smithsonian exhibit about transportation in American history. See “America on the Move.”

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