November 21, 1925 – Magnolia Petroleum Company incorporates in Texas

Formerly an unincorporated joint-stock association — with roots dating to an 1889 refinery in Corsicana, Texas — Magnolia Petroleum Company incorporates and transfers all assets to the new company. The original association, formed on April 24, 1911, by John H. Sealy, has grown to provide multiple grades of refined oil products through 505 service stations in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Standard Oil Company of New York purchases most of Magnolia Petroleum Company’s assets in December 1925 and operates it as a subsidiary. Magnolia Oil Company merges with Socony Mobile Oil Company on September 30, 1959, and is ultimately absorbed into today’s ExxonMobil Corporation.

November 22, 1878 – Historic Pipeline Company organizes
 
The Tidewater Pipe Company is organized in Pennsylvania. In 1879 it will build the first oil pipeline to cross the Alleghenies from Coryville to the Philadelphia Reading Railroad at Williamsport — bypassing Standard Oil’s dominance in transporting petroleum.

On May 28, 1879, an 80-horsepower engine in Coreyville will pump 250 barrels of oil from the Bradford oilfield across the mountains and into Williamsport 109 miles away. 

November 22, 1905 – Oklahoma Discovery will make Tulsa “Oil Capital of the World”

On a chilly November 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.” The discovery will help make Tulsa the “Oil Capital of the World.”

With daily production soon exceeding 120,000 barrels, Glenn Pool becomes the greatest oilfield in America at the time, exceeding the giant Spindletop discovery near Beaumont, Texas, four years earlier.

“Robert Galbreath and Frank Chesley had been alternating shifts on the floor of a cable-tool drilling rig in the Creek Indian Reservation,” notes Norman Hyne, professor of petroleum geology at the University of Tulsa.

“They had paid for the lease and the rig — five dollars a day including driller — with their own money. The well was on the banks of a creek located four miles south of an unimpressive, small town on the Frisco Railroad and the Arkansas River by the name of Tulsa.”

The two men drilled deeper after first penetrating the Red Fork Sands with only a small show of natural gas. Then, at a depth of about 1,450 feet, Ida Glenn No. 1 well came in as a 75-barrel-a-day producer of high-quality oil– known as light, sweet crude.

The well is named for the Creek Indian woman from whom the oilmen had leased 160 acres at three-cents an acre plus a one-eighth interest in any production. Galbreath drills a second well within 300 feet of his first well and then another. All are producers.

The wells reveal the 12-square-mile Glenn Pool.  A massive drilling boom begins — and drilling is cheap because producing wells are shallow, writes Tulsa author Ruth Sheldon Knowles in her 1959 book about wildcatters, The Greatest Gamblers. By the time of statehood in 1907, Glenn Pool has made Oklahoma the nation’s biggest oil producer.
 
“It was Oklahoma’s first major oilfield and the richest field the world had yet seen,” adds Hyne in an April 2005 article for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. “Unlike the thick, sour oil from Spindletop, the famed 1901 Texas discovery that had already played out, this oil was light and sweet — just right to refine into gasoline and kerosene. The reservoir was shallow, less than 1,500 feet deep, well within the range of the cable tool drilling rigs of that day.”

Hyne says that within two years of the discovery, pipelines are built from the Texaco and Gulf refineries on the Gulf Coast and down from the Standard Oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana, to access the high-quality crude. Numerous other refineries were built in the Glenn Pool area.

The giant oilfield produces 325.5 million barrels of oil by 1986, and royalties of almost one million dollars a year are paid to Creek Indians who hold 160-acre allotments in the field.

“It is said that more money was made on the Glenn Pool oilfield than the California gold rush and Colorado silver rush combined,” concludes Hyne, who created a Glenn Pool Oil Field Educational Center website after the well’s 2005 centennial. The field is now under waterflood (enhanced recovery) and producing primarily from small, marginal wells, he adds.

“Black gold from this field helped fuel the nation, and brought thousands of people and a new prosperity to Oklahoma,” explains a documentary about the 1905 discovery. “The Glenn Pool Story,” broadcast by the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, includes archival photos and rare film clips “to tell the compelling story of the Glenn Pool’s impact on America and how, a century later, the petroleum industry still benefits Oklahoma.”

In April 2008, a monument was unveiled in Glenpool’s Black Gold Park by the Glenn Pool Oil Field Commission. A  28-foot-tall “derrick” illuminates at night and includes granite etchings that tell the 1905 story of oilmen Robert Galbreath, Frank Chesley and Charles Colcord. The commission also sponsored publication of Almost Forgotten — The Amazing Story of Glenn Pool: Oklahoma’s First World-Class Oil Field, distributed to high schools by the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board.

November 23, 1951 – Superman features “World’s Deepest Oil Well”

A risk of drilling too deep highlights the theatrical release of “Superman and the Mole Men,” which earns good reviews. The movie features newspaper reporters Clark Kent (George Reeves) and Lois Lane (Phyllis Coates) traveling on assignment to the town of Silsby, “Home of the World’s Deepest Oil Well.”

The National Oil Company is making news at its “Havenhurst Experimental Number One” drilling site — the drill bit “has broken into clear air” at 32,000 feet. “Good heavens, that’s practically to the center of the earth!” Lois exclaims (in fact, the deepest U.S. well in 1951 reached 20,521 feet). The oilmen conclude there may be life, perhaps even a civilization, far below the surface. Alarmed, the company attempts to cap the well — but small humanoid creatures emerge. The townspeople fear an invasion of mole men.

It takes the compassion of Superman to resolve the crisis. He calms the mob, saves the creatures, and returns them to the safety of the well. In a spectacular conclusion, the derrick collapses in flames, forever closing the connection between the two worlds.

November 23, 1953 – First LPG Ship departs Houston

The first seagoing Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) ship goes into service when Warren Petroleum Corporation of Tulsa, Oklahoma, sends the Natalie O. Warren from the Houston Ship Channel terminal at Norsworthy, Texas, to Newark, New Jersey.

The unique vessel has an LPG capacity of 38,053 barrels in 68 vertical pressure tanks — the equivalent of about 339,000 standard gas grill LP tanks. The ship is the former Cape Diamond dry-cargo freighter, converted and refitted over a five-month period by the Bethlehem Steelyard in Beaumont, Texas.

The experimental design will lead to new maritime construction standards for such vessels. After 14 years of successful service, the Natalie O. Warren is scrapped in Santander, Spain. Today’s LPG tankers may carry more than 18 times the capacity of the Natalie O. Warren.

November 25, 1875 – Continental Oil and Transportation

Convinced that he can profit by purchasing bulk kerosene in cheaper eastern markets and shipping it by rail to Ogden, Utah, for distribution, Isaac Elder Blake forms the Continental Oil and Transportation Company.

Continental purchases two railroad tank cars — the first to be used west of the Mississippi River — and begins shipping kerosene from a Cleveland, Ohio, refinery. The company quickly grows, expanding into Colorado in 1876 and California in 1877.

However, when John D. Rockefeller acquires the Consolidated Tank Line Company in San Francisco, the competitive advantages of Standard Oil overpower Blake’s enterprise. Standard absorbs Continental Oil in 1885. After the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil, Continental Oil will reemerge as an independent company. It continues today as ConocoPhillips.

November 27, 1940 – “Gas” by Edward Hopper exhibited in New York

Edward Hopper’s painting “Gas” is first exhibited by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Hopper began the painting in September 1940, when his wife Jo wrote, “Ed is about to start a canvas — an effect of night on a gasoline station.”

Hopper’s image — which includes the flying Pegasus logo of Mobilgas — is an amalgamation of several gas stations in and around his home and studio in Truro, Massachusetts. It illustrates his unique American style — as reflected in such icons as “Nighthawks,” painted two years later.

Critics praise Hopper’s visual mastery of isolation and melancholy, but also suggest that “Gas” with its commonplace Mobilgas advertisement presages America’s Pop Art movement that comes a decade later. Fellow artist Charles Burchfield admires Hopper’s simple title for the painting, saying that for “a less discerning artist, (it) would have come out as ‘Gas Station’ or ‘Gas Station Attendant.’”

Edward Hopper dies on May 15, 1967, at the age of 84. Read more about Mobil’s logo in “High Flying Trademark.”

November 27, 1941 – “Oil Queen of California” dies

Mrs. Emma Summers, once known as the “Oil Queen of California” dies at the age of 83 in Los Angeles.

Forty years earlier, the San Francisco Call newspaper described Mrs. Summers as “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.”

Summers graduated from Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music and moved to Los Angeles in 1893 to teach piano — but soon caught oil fever. 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.

Summers’ first 14 oil wells came in as producers — and launched her dominance in the Los Angeles oilfield. See “Oil Queen of California.”

 
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