The exploration history of the U.S. offshore oil and natural gas industry began in the Pacific Ocean more than 100 years ago. As recently as 1947 no company had ever risked drilling beyond the sight of land.

America’s offshore petroleum industry began in the late 19th century in Pacific Ocean with drilling and production piers at Summerland, California. Drilling platforms also appreared on lakes in Ohio and Louisiana. By the 1940s, technology was taking wells far into the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1896, as enterprising businessmen pursued California’s prolific Summerland oilfield all the way to the beach, the lure of offshore production enticed Henry L. Williams and his associates to build a pier 300 feet out into the Pacific – and mount a standard cable-tool rig on it.

Although never built, Thomas Rowland’s 1869 design for an offshore platform was far ahead of its time.

By 1897 this first offshore well was producing oil and 22 companies soon joined in the boom, constructing 14 more piers and over 400 wells within the next five years. The Summerland offshore field produced for 25 years – fueling the growth of California’s economy.

Piers, Platforms and a Patent

In 1894, Henry Williams drilled two wells on a California beach. He drilled another in 1895 with encouraging results. This led Williams and others to exploring for oil offshore the next year.

They constructed piers and drilled wells, leading to the realization that the Summerland oilfield extended offshore. This would be the first offshore field developed in the nation by drilling offshore wells from piers. – From Santa Barbara County records

In 1911, Gulf Refining Co. abandoned the use of piers. It drilled Ferry Lake No. 1 on Caddo Lake, Louisiana, using a fleet of tugboats, barges, and floating pile drivers. When the well came in at 450 barrels per day, Gulf constructed platforms every 600 feet on each 10-acre lakebed site.

The  Caddo Lake wells – completed over water without a pier connection to shore – have frequently been called America’s first true offshore drilling . However, Ohio oil documents record hundreds of oil wells pumping far out into a lake – 20 years before drillers ventured into the waters of Caddo Lake.

Louisiana’s Caddo Lake, circa 1911.

As early as 1891, the first submerged oil wells were drilled from platforms built on piles in Grand Lake St. Marys in Ohio, notes historian Judith L. Sneed in “The First Over Water Drilling: The Lost History Of Ohio’s Grand Reservoir Oil Boom.” See “Ohio Offshore Wells.”

Even earlier, some historians say the true beginning of the modern offshore industry can be traced to an 1869 U.S. patent. Thomas Fitch Rowland of Greenpoint, New York, patented a “submarine drilling apparatus” on May 4, 1869.

Rowland’s design included a fixed, working platform for drilling offshore to a depth of almost 50 feet. The anchored, four-legged tower – with telescoping legs “suitable hydraulic attachments or devices” – resembles modern offshore platforms. Ream more in “An 1869 Offshore Rig Patent.”

Gulf of Mexico Technologies

In 1938, Pure Oil Co. and Superior Oil Co. built a freestanding drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, despite logistics, engineering, and communications challenges.

They hired a Houston engineering and construction company, Brown & Root Marine Operators, Inc., to build a 320-foot by 180-foot freestanding wooden deck in 14-feet of water about a mile offshore. The chosen drilling site was near Creole, La.

Using onshore building criteria and intuition, the Creole platform was designed to withstand winds of 150 mph and constructed 15 feet above the water. Three hundred treated yellow pine pilings were driven 14 feet into the sandy bottom.

The Superior-Pure State No. 1 well was successful – but was wiped off its pilings by a hurricane in 1940. Although the pilings were damaged, the platform was quickly rebuilt and put back into production in the four million barrel field.

Onshore salt domes were recorded as early as 1890 by the Geological Survey of Texas.

“It may be tentatively assumed that the Gulf of Mexico is a potential source of salt-dome oil…Whether or not it will ever be economically feasible to explore these waters for the domes that must exist is a question for the future to answer.” – Geologist Orval Lester Brace in 1941.

Kerr-McGee dramatically answered the salt dome question in 1947 with an experimental offshore rig.

Not much equipment specifically designed for offshore drilling existed and exploration remained an extraordinarily speculative and risky business venture. An offshore dry hole could easily swallow the huge capital costs sunk into construction of a large, permanent rig platforms.

Nevertheless, Dean McGee of Kerr-McGee Oil Industries Inc. partnered with Phillips Petroleum and Stanolind Oil & Gas Co. to secure leases for exploratory wells in the Gulf of Mexico. They hired Brown & Root to build a freestanding platform 10 miles out to sea.

The Mighty Kermac No. 16

“We decided to explore the areas where the really potential prolific production might be – salt domes – the good ones on land were gone, but we could move out in the shallow water and, in effect, get into a virgin area where we could find the real class-one type salt dome prospect,” McGee said.

Vessels were needed to provide supplies, equipment, and crew quarters for the drilling site, 43 miles southwest of Morgan City, La. The gradually sloping Gulf of Mexico reached only about 18-feet deep at the drilling site. A second platform would be built about eight miles from the first at Ship Shoal Block 28. Sixteen 24-inch pilings were sunk 104 feet into the ocean floor to secure a 2,700 square foot wooden deck.

The Kermac No. 16 well stood in almost 20 feet of water, 10 miles at sea.

The well was spudded on Sept. 10, 1947. The biggest hurricane of the season arrived a week later – with winds of 140 mph. Kerr-McGee had $450,000 invested in the project. Both platforms were evacuated during the hurricane, but damage was minimal. Drilling promptly resumed. On Nov.14, the Kermac No. 16 well came in at 40 barrels per hour.

“Spectacular Gulf of Mexico Discovery. Possible 100-Million Barrel Field – 10 Miles at Sea,” proclaimed the Oil & Gas Journal. Kermac No.16 would produce 1.4 million barrels of oil and 307 million cubic feet of natural gas by 1984.

Early drillers focused on natural oil seeps – until a 1901 gusher at Spindletop, a salt dome in Beaumont, Texas. Seismic instruments revealed how salt moved up through the earth – sometimes leaving oil trapped.

New Records

By the end of 1949, 11 oil and natural gas fields were found in the Gulf of Mexico with 44 exploratory wells, according to the National Ocean Industries Association, which notes that the industry continued to through the 1950s.

Modern offshore energy industry benefits come from the hard lessons learned from 60 years of open water experience. Compared to the limits of just a few years ago, today’s achievements will no doubt pale in comparison to what the future of offshore exploration will bring.

Revenue generated from the production of oil became the second-largest revenue generator for the country, after income taxes. NOIA also notes:

As the industry entered the last decade of the 20th century, advancing technology ensued. New depth records for drilling reached 7,625 feet in the Gulf of Mexico, and Shell Oil’s platform ‘Troll,’ which stands in the North Sea in 1,000 feet of water, 1,500 feet high, became one of two man-made objects visible with the naked eye from the surface of the moon. The other is the Great Wall of China.

The first use of helicopters offshore was at the request of Kerr-McGee and Humble Oil. Bell Helicopters recognized the opportunity and formed Petroleum Bell Helicopters Co.

At right is a Bell Helicopter advertisement from 1954, courtesy the Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig and Museum

A flat area on an LST (from WW Two’s landing ship, tanks) anchored next to Humble Rig 28 served as landing pad for one of the first helicopters to be flown offshore.

Moveable rigs drill many exploratory offshore wells. Sometimes it is more economical to build a permanent platform from which well completion, extraction and production can occur. These large, permanent platforms are extremely expensive; they generally require large expected hydrocarbon deposits to be economical to construct.

This depiction of offshore drilling and completion platforms gives an idea of just how massive modern rigs can be. Because of their size, most permanent offshore rigs are constructed in pieces near land.

As components of the rig are completed, they are taken out to the drilling location. Sometimes construction or assembly can even take place as the rig is being transported to its intended destination, notes naturalgas.org.

Also see “Rigs to Reefs,“ “Deep Sea Roughnecks” and “Swimming Wrenches” (a history of remotely operated undersea vehicles).

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A “big fin” squid.

On November 11, 2007, a mile and a half underwater, a petroleum company’s remote control submersible camera captured a rarely seen Magnapinna squid.

The brief video, obtained by National Geographic News, shows the alien-like squid loiter above the seafloor in the Gulf of Mexico. The clip – from Shell Oil Company’s Perdido production site — marks the first sighting of a Magnapinna or “big fin” squid near oil development. Some marine biologists have now formed partnerships with petroleum companies.

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Offshore Oil and Gas Resources

Gulf of Mexico federal offshore oil production accounts for 23 percent of total U.S. crude oil production and federal offshore natural gas production in the Gulf accounts for 7 percent of total U.S. dry production, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Over 40 percent of total U.S. petroleum refining capacity is located along the Gulf coast, as well as 30 percent of total U.S. natural gas processing plant capacity.

To meet increasing U.S. demand while addressing environmental concerns, new technologies have resulted in drilling rigs capable of drilling 250 miles offshore to ocean depths exceeding 10,000 feet. At stake are an additional 19 billion barrels of oil and another 86 trillion cubic feet of gas. Fear of oil spills and heated environmental debates restrict access to many potential areas.

More than 5,000 offshore oil and natural gas platforms operate in the Gulf of Mexico around the clock, seven-days a week. It is the largest artificial reef system in the world.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, more than 60 percent of all oil found in seawater is not from wells, but from natural seepage (the largest emitting 1,000 barrels of oil a week); 32 percent comes from shipping and run-off from land. Four percent can be attributed to tanker spills.

However, near Santa Barbara, Calif., offshore drilling’s worst environmental disaster occurred in 1969 when an undersea well blew out. The calamity quickly brought industry changes that have protected the offshore environment ever since.

Between 1980 and 1999, about 7.4 billion barrels of oil were produced in federal waters, says the U.S. Coast Guard. Less than a thousandth of one percent spilled – less than the natural seepage of oil from the sea floor.

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

February 19, 1863 – Pennsylvania Pipeline

First pipeline from an oilfield to a refinery is completed at Oil Creek, Pennsylvania. New Jersey inventor J. L. Hutchings constructs the 2.5-mile pipeline from James Tarr’s farm near Oil Creek to the Humboldt refinery using newly patented rotary pumps to move the oil through two-inch diameter piping. Unfortunately, leaking makes this innovative pipeline impractical.

Visit the “valley that changed the world” and the Drake Well Museum in Titusville.

February 19, 1889 – Ohio acts to Conserve Natural Gas

The Ohio House of Representatives enacts the state’s first petroleum conservation measure – “an Act to prevent the wasting of Natural Gas and to Provide for the plugging of all abandoned wells.”

The Ohio Oil and Gas Association documents wells drilled/completed by County in 2010.

The state’s first commercial petroleum production had begun almost 30 years earlier in Macksburg, Washington County, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

Ohio remains a leading producer, ranking in the top half of all producing states, the agency notes. As of 2010, more than 275,700 wells have been drilled in the state – yielding more than 1.1 billion barrels of oil and more than 8.52 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Modern technologies now are finding success in eastern Ohio – the Marcellus shale.

Ohio also claims an 1814 oil discovery as America’s first with a drilled well, according to the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program. “Two men drilled 475 feet in search of salt in Olive Township of Noble County,” says Director Rhonda Reda. “They cursed when a black liquid oozed into the pit.”

February 20, 1959 – World’s First LNG Tanker arrives

After a three-week voyage, the Methane Pioneer – the world’s first liquefied natural gas tanker – arrives at the world’s first LNG terminal at Canvey Island, England, from Lake Charles, Louisiana. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

February 12, 1954 – First Major Oil Discovery in Nevada

Nevada’s petroleum industry begins with the discovery of oil by Shell Oil’s Eagle Springs No. 1 well drilled in Railroad Valley in Nye County.

Shell Oil Company’s second test of its Eagle Springs No. 1 well finds oil.

This routine test becomes the discovery well for the Railroad Valley field – and Nevada’s first major producer.

“This milestone represents a great achievement for Nevada’s oil industry,” notes Alan Coyner, administrator of the Nevada Division of Minerals. “Nevada continues to have tremendous exploration potential for additional oil discoveries in the future.”

According to the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, the discovery well is 10,358 feet deep and produces 306,029 barrels of oil from a productive interval between 6,450 and 6,730 feet during its 16-year productive life.

Since 1954, there have been about 50 million barrels of oil produced from 101 wells drilled within 15 different Nevada fields.

February 13, 1924 – Forest Oil incorporates

Forest Oil’s logo features the “Yellow Dog” — a two-wicked lantern once used on derricks.

A corporate logo with a lantern burning two wicks? An oil company originally founded in 1916 consolidates with four other independent petroleum companies to form the Forest Oil Corporation – an early leader in secondary recovery technology.

Originally based in Bradford, Pennsylvania – home of the “first billion dollar oilfield” in the United States – the Forest Oil logo features the lantern often seen on early wooden derricks. Some believe the lantern’s name, “yellow dog,” comes from the two burning wicks resembling a dog’s glowing eyes at night.

Read “Yellow Dog – Oilfield Lantern.”

Today headquartered in Denver, Forest Oil (publicly held since 1969) and its subsidiaries engage in petroleum exploration, production and marketing, with principal reserves and producing properties in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. 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 »

January 21, 1865 - Civil War Veteran tests an Oil Well “Torpedo”

A Pennsylvania historical marker commemorates Colonel E.A.L. Roberts, a Civil War veteran who patented “torpedoes” – iron canisters filled with gunpowder (later nitroglycerin) that were lowered into wells and ignited by a weight dropped along a suspension wire onto a percussion cap.

Civil War veteran Col. Edward A. L. Roberts (1829-1881) conducts his first experiment to increase oil production by using an explosive charge deep in the well.

Roberts twice detonates eight pounds of black powder 465 feet deep in the bore of the Ladies Well on Watson’s Flats south of Titusville, Pennsylvania.

The “shooting” of the well increases daily production from a few barrels to more than 40 barrels. In 1866, the Titusville Morning Herald will report:

Our attention has been called to a series of experiments that have been made in the wells of various localities by Col. Roberts, with his newly patented torpedo.

The results have in many cases been astonishing. The torpedo, which is an iron case, containing an amount of powder varying from 15 pounds to 20 pounds, is lowered into the well, down to the spot, as near as can be ascertained, where it is necessary to explode it. It is then exploded by means of a cap on the torpedo, connected with the top of the shell by a wire. Read the rest of this entry »

January 14, 1928 – Future Dr. Seuss begins Career at Standard Oil  

During the Great Depression, Theodore Geisel created advertising campaigns for Standard Oil – where he developed the skills – and critters – that would redefine children’s literature.

New York City’s Judge magazine includes its first cartoon drawn by Theodore Seuss Geisel – who will develop his skills as “Dr. Seuss” while working for Standard Oil Company.

In the 1928 cartoon that launches his career, Geisel draws a peculiar dragon trying to dodge Flit, a popular bug spray of the day. 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.

Veteran oilman George W. Strake Sr. made a major discovery eight miles southeast of Conroe, Texas, in December 1931. His wildcat well would prove historic in many ways.

Although the Conroe well’s producing sands proved to be dangerously gas-charged, shallow and unstable, the giant oil field – the third largest in the United States at the time - soon had 60 successful wells producing more than 65,000 of barrels of oil a day. The region north of Houston boomed as the Great Depression worsened.

Disaster came in January 1933 when one of the wells blew out and erupted into flame. The runaway well cratered – completely swallowing nearby drilling rigs. Read the rest of this entry »

December 17, 1884 –  Fighting Oil Field Fires with Cannons

Especially in the Great Plains, frequent lightening strikes caused oil tank fires. This rare photograph is from the collection of the Kansas Oil Museum in El Dorado.

“Oil Fires, like Battles, are fought by Artillery” is the catchy phrase in a New England magazine.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology publishes its firsthand account of the problem of lightning strikes in America’s growing number of oil fields – and the technology used to extinguish burning oil tanks. MIT not only reports on the fiery results of an oil field lightning strike, but also the practice of using artillery to fight such conflagrations.

A park in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, includes an “oil patch cannon.”

“A Thunder-Storm in the Oil Country” explains that “it is usually desirable to let (oil) out of the tank to burn on the ground in thin layers; so small cannon throwing a three inch solid shot are kept at various stations throughout the region for this purpose.”

Today, several oil patch community museums have a cannon on exhibit to educate visitors about this early firefighting technology, especially in the Great Plains, where frequent lightening strikes caused oil tank fires. Oil patch museums in Seminole and Bartlesville, Oklahoma, include cannons to educate visitors about this early fire-fighting technology. Read more in “Oil Field Artillery.” 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 »

December 10, 1844 – “Coal Oil Johnny” adopted

“Coal Oil Johnny” Steele

The future “Coal Oil Johnny” is adopted as an infant by Culbertson and Sarah McClintock. John Steels is adopted along with his sister, Permelia, and brought home to the McClintock farm on the banks of Oil Creek in Venango County, Pennsylvania.

The petroleum boom prompted by Edwin Drake’s discovery 15 years later – America’s first commercial oil well – will lead to the widow McClintock making a fortune in royalties. She leaves the money to her only surviving child, Johnny, when she dies in a kitchen fire in 1864. At age 20, he inherits $24,500 – and $2,800 a day in royalties.

“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 more in “Legend of ‘Coal Oil Johnny.’” Read the rest of this entry »

September 11, 1866 – Turning Kerosene into a “Vacuum Harness Oil”

Beginning in 1866, “Ewing’s Patent Vacuum Oil” preserved and lubricated leather harnesses.

Carpenter and part-time inventor Matthew P. Ewing patents a method of distilling kerosene in a vacuum to produce lubricants.

Three weeks later, with partner Hiram Bond Everest, he founds Vacuum Oil Company in Rochester, New York. Their first product is “Ewing’s Patent Vacuum Oil,” extolled for its virtues as a leather conditioner and preserver.

Ewing leaves the partnership, but Everest continues to develop his unique vacuum-produced lubricants such as a Vacuum Harness Oil - which he initially distributes in square containers previously used for canned oysters.

The company prospers with the production of heavy lubricating oils. In 1880, Everest sells 75 percent of Vacuum Oil to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil for $200,000. More than half a century later, the company will become the Socony Mobil Oil Company (see “Mobil’s High-Flying Trademark”). 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 »

August 27, 1859 – Birth of U.S. Petroleum Industry

“August 27, 1859, is one of those special dates that changed the world,” notes one historian. “Edwin Drake’s quest to find oil by drilling was a success, and the modern oil and gas industry took a giant leap forward.”

The modern American petroleum industry is born in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The Seneca Oil Company’s highly speculative pursuit of oil is rewarded when Edwin L. Drake and his blacksmith driller, William “Uncle Billy” Smith, bring in the first commercial oil well at 69.5 feet near Oil Creek in Venango County. They launch a new industry.

For many Americans, western Pennsylvania in the 1850s was considered wilderness. When a group of New Haven, Connecticut, investors sought someone to drill in a region known for its oil seeps, they turned to a former railroad conductor already familiar with the area. It also helped that Drake was allowed free passage on trains.

Although earlier cable-tool drillers of brine wells had found small amounts of oil – an unwanted byproduct – “Colonel” Drake’s 1859 discovery well along Oil Creek would launch the modern petroleum industry. As a result of his perseverance, many new products, including newly invented kerosene, would create the demand for oil and natural gas that continues to this day. Read the rest of this entry »

August 7, 1933 – Alley Oop’s Oil Field Roots

“Alley Oop” appears for the first time when former Ft. Worth Star-Telegram reporter Victor (V.T.) Hamlin publishes the caveman as a syndicated daily cartoon in Iowa’s Des Moines Register. The comic strip is a hit and ultimately appears in more than 800 newspapers. The West Texas oil town of Iraan lays claim to Hamlin’s paleontological inspiration.

A 1995 postage stamp commemorates “Alley Oop” by Victor Hamlin, a cartoonist originally from Iraan, Texas.

Iraan (pronounced eye-rah-ann) first appeared in 1926 as a company town following the discovery of the prolific Yates oilfield. Many of its early buildings were constructed by the Big Lake Oil Company.

The Yates field will produce more than 40 million barrels in just three years, but Iraan’s best years will be over by 1960 – when the band Hollywood Argyles sings that Alley Oop is “the toughest man there is alive.”

Although Alley Oop is one of 20 comic strips commemorated in a 1995 series of U.S. postage stamps, Yates oilfield production and Iraan’s fortunes have both declined. The town opened its Alley Oop Fantasy Land theme park in 1965 with favorite son Hamlin in attendance.

Today, tourists visit the Alley Oop Museum and R.V. Park on the northwest edge of Iraan at 9261 Alley Oop Lane, off of U.S. 190. Thanks to improved technologies, production from Yates oil wells continues – and the field is estimated to have one billion barrels of recoverable oil remaining. Read the rest of this entry »

August 1, 1872 – First Pennsylvania Natural Gas Pipeline

Natural gas will power Pittsburgh steel mills.

The first recorded large-scale delivery of natural gas by pipeline begins when gas is delivered to Titusville, Pennsylvania, through a two-inch wrought iron pipeline from a well five miles to the northeast. The well’s high production — four million cubic feet of natural gas a day –  is the largest in the oil region.

The mayor of Titusville and the Keystone Gas & Water Company constructed the pipeline to deliver “the most powerful and voluminous  gas well on record” to more than 250 residential and commercial customers in Titusville. A second 3.25-inch diameter pipe is soon added.  The well produces into the 1880s.

Once an underestimated byproduct of the new petroleum industry, practical uses of natural gas will be introduced by George  Westinghouse for the Pittsburgh steel and glass industries, notes David Waples, author of The Natural Gas Industry in Appalachia. Learn more  Pennsylvania petroleum history at the Drake Well Museum in Titusville. 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 »

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 »