by Bruce Wells | Dec 16, 2023 | This Week in Petroleum History
December 18, 1929 – California Oil Boom in Venice –
The Ohio Oil Company completed a wildcat well in Venice, California, on the Marina Peninsula, east of the Grand Canal, two blocks from the ocean. The oilfield discovery well produced 3,000 barrels of oil a day from a depth of 6,200 feet. The Ohio Oil Company, which would become Marathon Oil of Ohio, had received a zoning variance permitting exploration within the city limits. Discovery of the Venice oilfield launched another California drilling boom similar to Signal Hill eight years earlier.
“Derricks by the Road” by California artist JoAnn Cowans (1933-2022), who in the early 1960s painted Venice and Brea oilfield derricks before they were dismantled.
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by Bruce Wells | Dec 16, 2023 | Petroleum Art
Cartographer visited petroleum boom towns to draw popular bird’s-eye views.
Thaddeus M. Fowler created detailed, panoramic maps of America’s earliest petroleum boom towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His popular cartographic depictions of oil patch communities in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and Texas offered “aero views” seemingly drawn from great heights.
More than 400 Thaddeus Fowler panoramas have been identified. There are 324 in the Library of Congress, including this one of Oil City, Pennsylvania, in 1896. Source: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C.
Fowler has the largest number of panoramic maps in the collection of the Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, D.C. His hand-drawn lithographs have fascinated viewers since the Victorian Age. Being depicted in one of Fowler’s maps, also known as “bird’s-eye views,” was a matter of civic pride for many community leaders. (more…)
