Oil patch lore says “yellow dog” lanterns were so named because their two burning wicks resembled a dog’s glowing eyes at night. Others say the lamps cast a dog’s head shadow on the derrick floor.

Rare is the community oil and natural gas museum that doesn’t have a “yellow dog” in its collection. The two-wicked lamp is an oilfield icon. Some say that the unusual design originated with whaling ships – but neither the Nantucket nor New Bedford whaling museums can find any such evidence.

Inventor Jonathan Dillen’s lantern was designed to “obviate explosion, and is especially adapted for use in the oil regions, to give light in and about the derricks and other machinery of oil wells, where the explosion of a lamp is attended with great danger by causing destructive conflagration and consequent loss of life and property.”

Railroad museums have collections of cast iron smudge pots, but nothing quite like the oilfields’ yellow dogs. Although many companies manufactured the iron or steel lamps, the yellow dog’s origins remain in the dark.

Oil patch lore says these lanterns were so named because their two burning wicks resembled a dog’s glowing eyes at night. Others say the lamps cast a dog’s head shadow on the derrick floor.

Inventor Jonathan Dillen of Petroleum Centre, Pennsylvania, was first to patent what became the yellow dog in 1870, “for illuminating places out of doors, especially in and about derricks, and machinery in the oil regions, whereby explosions are more dangerous and destructive to life and property than in most other places.”

Dillen’s patent was improved and reissued in 1872 and again in 1877, when it was assigned to John Eaton and E. H. Cole.

“My improved lamp is intended to burn crude petroleum as it comes from the wells fresh and gassy,” Dillen proclaimed  It is to be used, mainly, around oil wells, and its construction is such as to make it very strong, so that it cannot be easily broken or exploded.”

The “yellow dog,” a two-wicked cast iron lamp invented by Jonathan Dillen of Petroleum Centre, Pennsylvania, in 1870.

Eaton, Cole & Burnham Company grew from John Eaton’s 1861 business trip to the booming oil region of western Pennsylvania. Within a few years, he set up his own business with Edward Cole.

With the addition of Edward Burnham, the company grew to become a preeminent supplier of oilfield equipment. It became Oil Well Supply Company in 1878.

At its 45-acre Imperial Works alongside the Allegheny River in Oil City, Oil Well Supply produced oilfield engines and “cast and malleable iron goods” – including yellow dogs. The 1884 catalog listed yellow dog lamps at a price of $1.50 each.

Forest Oil's logo features the "Yellow Dog" -- the two-wicked oilfield lantern.

Oil Well Supply became part of United States Steel Corporation in 1929. Today, along with their shadowy origins, yellow dogs are relegated to museums, antique shops and collectors.

Forest Oil Corporate Logo

A producer of oil and natural gas, Forest Oil Corporation is credited with developing secondary recovery of oil technique (waterflooding) in the early 1900s – a revolutionary event for the oil and gas industry at that time.

Forest Oil adopted an image of the yellow dog derrick lantern as its corporate logo in 1916, when Forest Dale Dorn and Clayton Glenville Dorn founded an oilfield service company in northern Pennsylvania. The company’s roots can be traced to the nation’s first giant oilfield in Bradford, discovered in 1871.

A museum near Bradford, Pennsylvania educates visitors using a 72-foot standard cable-tool derrick -- 1880s technology that once helped the region produce 74 percent of all the oil in America

By 1916, oil production in the Bradford field had declined to just under 40 barrels a day. The reserve was considered by many to be dry. Undeterred, Dorn applied his new waterflooding technique to initiate secondary recovery of oil.

The success of Dorn’s method prompted him to create his own water-flooding company. Within five years, Forest Oil was recognized as a leader in secondary oil recovery systems. This enhanced recovery technology was soon being applied throughout the industry — aiding in the extension of oil wells’ lives by as much as 10 years.

The keystone shape in the center of the lantern symbolizes the state of Pennsylvania – where the first commercial U.S. oil was drilled in 1859 and where Forest Oil was founded in 1916. The company is now headquartered in Denver, Colorado.

Bradford’s Petroleum Museum

Visit the Penn-Brad Historical Oil Park and Museum near Bradford, Pennsylvania — where a modern natural gas shale boom has renewed the historic oil patch economy.

Located in Custer City, three miles south of Bradford, the museum (which now is being renovated by volunteers) “preserves the philosophy, the spirit, and the accomplishments of an oil country community – taking visitors back to early oil boom days of the first billion dollar oil field.”

A main attraction is the 72-foot standard cable-tool derrick, a replica of the technology that in the 1880s helped Bradford once produce an incredible 74 percent of all the oil in America. It was the nation’s  ”first billion-dollar oilfield.”