July 4, 1906 – Louisiana conserves Natural Gas
 
Louisiana enacts conservation measures to prevent waste. The Louisiana State Legislature passes an act “to protect the natural gas fields of this state.”  The conservation law imposes penalties for “failure to cap out of control wells, doing injury to pipe lines, or wastefully burning natural gas from any well into the air.” It empowers the governor to use the state board of engineers to shut down offending wells at the owner’s expense. The conservation measure is a result of lessons learned from Indiana and other early natural gas producing states. See “Indiana Natural Gas Boom.”

July 5, 1883 – Pennsylvania passes Pipeline Law

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania enacts a law “to provide for gauging the petroleum in the custody of, and examination into the condition of, firms associations and corporations engaged in the business of storing and transporting of petroleum by means of pipe lines.”

On July 6, 1988 — North Sea disaster

Occidental Petroleum Corporation’s Piper Alpha offshore production platform in the North Sea is destroyed “when an out of service gas condensate pump is started with its pressure safety valve removed. The subsequent gas leak, explosion and fire results in the deaths of 167 workers.” It remains the world’s most deadly offshore disaster.

July 8, 1937 – Gulf of Mexico Drilling Pier

President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of War approves an ambitious plan to build a one-mile pier into the Gulf of Mexico to explore for oil.

War Secretary Harry Hines Woodring approves an application to drill near McFaddin Beach, Texas, by the Humble Oil and Refining Company. The 60-acre lease is about eight miles east of Galveston County’s High Island. Humble Oil builds the pier into the Gulf and erects three drilling rigs (above what geologist describe as a shallow salt dome).

All three wells are dry holes and a hurricane destroys the pier and rigs in 1938. Visit the Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig Museum and Education Center on Galveston Island 

July 9, 1815 – Early Natural Gas Discovery

Natural gas is discovered accidentally by Capt. James Wilson during the digging of a salt brine well within the present city limits of Charleston, West Virginia (Virginia in 1815).

The site is near where George Washington noted “burning springs” along the Kanawha River in his 1775 diary. Washington was awarded tracts of the land in Wirt County, which in the 1860s would experience one of America’s earliest oil booms.

Visit the Oil & Gas Museum in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The first commercial discovery of natural gas will be in 1821 in Fredonia, New York.

July 9, 1883 – Oil in the Land of Oz

The future world-famous author of the children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz starts a business selling petroleum products in Syracuse, New York.

L. Frank Baum and his brother Benjamin begin their enterprise by offering lubricants, oils, greases – and Baum’s Castorine, “the great axle oil.”

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

Although it will eventually fail, Baum’s Castorine Company prospers with L. Frank Baum serving as superintendent and chief salesman for the next four years. “He was a traveling salesman for the company,” notes an exhibit at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum in Michigan.

“On one of these trips, while installing a window display for a customer, the idea of the Tin Woodman came to him,” the museum claims. “The company enjoyed some success but came to an end when the bookkeeper gambled away the profits.”

L. Frank Baum writes of Baum’s Castorine Company, “I see no future in it to warrant my wasting any more years of my life in trying to boom it.” He sells the business and in May 1900, publishes his children’s classic. The Baum’s Castorine Company retains the name — and today operates from Rome, New York. 

The Kalamazoo museum exhibit notes that Baum was born in Chittenango, New York, on May 15, 1856, the seventh of nine children of Cynthia Stanton and Benjamin Ward Baum — one of only five of the children to survived into adulthood. He would have many job experiences — as a newspaper publisher, actor and the lubricant salesman. His connection to the oil and natural gas industry began earlier.

L. Frank Baum wasn’t a true oilman — but his father was. Thanks to Benjamin Ward Baum’s financial success in the newly born Pennsylvania petroleum industry, the young Baum grew up in an environment where his imagination and love of reading flourished.

In 1860, just one year after America’s first commercial oil discovery, Benjamin Ward Baum closed the family barrel-making business to risk his fortunes in the western Pennsylvania oilfields. His son L. (Lyman) Frank was then only four and a half years old. Productive oil wells drilled near Titusville and Cherry Tree Run will bring Benjamin Ward Baum great wealth.

Just two years later, the elder Baum owns Carbon Oil Company — and is a well-established oilman. His success helps finance diversification into dry goods and other mercantile businesses. Son Frank finds employment in several of these family ventures as a young man. When his father purchases the Cynthia Oil Works in Bolivar, New York, Frank operates a retail outlet for awhile.

“The Cynthia Oil Works, the first refinery in Bolivar Township, was erected on the Porter Cowles flats at the north end of Bolivar village in 1882,” explains historian Ronald G. Taylor. Visit the Pioneer Oil Museum in Bolivar.

“The plant, owned by B. W. Baum & Son, dealers in oil leases and managers of the first opera house at Richburg, was designed as a lubricating oil works and for the manufacture of ship oil of 300 fire test for illuminating on board ships,” Taylor adds in his post for the Allegany County Historical Society. “The capacity of the stills was 85 barrels a day. It advertised to manufacture ‘just as good quality machine oil as the big Eclipse refinery at Franklin.’”

In 1887, after almost 30 years in the oil business, Benjamin Ward Baum died in New York. His father’s prosperity in the petroleum business permitted Frank to pursue his interests in writing, publishing, acting, and even raising poultry (he published a magazine called The Poultry Record). 

From the time he was able to write, L. Frank Baum had done so. At age 15, he and his younger brother Harry had published The Rose Lawn Home Journal with short stories, poems, riddles, articles, and advertising for one of his father’s companies, Neal, Baum & Company.

Baum continued to learn his craft by writing for newspapers, journals, and the stage. His first book, a poultry manual called The Book of the Hamburgs, was published in 1886, the year before his father died. It would be 13 years and several careers later, however, before Baum would forever secure his place in children’s’ dreams with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 

Editor’s Note — “Sometimes, when researching history, you find places where it’s still alive,” declares Evan L. Schwartz in his March 17, 2009, Finding the Mythic Oil-Can website post.

“My search for the Tin Man’s mythic oil-can led me to such a spot,” he says. “L. Frank Baum sold cans of buggy wheel oil for a living as the co-owner of Baum’s Castorine Co. of Syracuse, New York.”

Schwartz, the  author of Finding Oz, L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story, notes the company’s troubles that led to Baum’s selling it in 1888. He describes discovering that the company still manufactures industrial oils and lubricants under the Baum’s brand name.

“So I visited the current location in Rome, New York, and sat down for a peek into the archives with owner Charles Mowry, whose grandfather was one of the investors who bought the company from Frank Baum himself,” Schwartz explains. “The smells of fine lubricant wafted in the air as I perused the collection of historic oil cans and heard the legend of Baum’s magic balms.”

He concludes: “What if Frank had never sold oil cans? Would we have never met the heartless Tin Man? And in 1939, why wasn’t Baum’s Castorine given the chance to pony up for some choice product placement?”"