by Bruce Wells | May 20, 2025 | Petroleum Products
Crayola — a 1903 petroleum product name combining the French words craie, chalk, and oléagineux, containing oil.
Many petroleum products hide in plain sight. For Pennsylvania’s Benny & Smith Company, common oilfield paraffin changed the company’s future by coloring children’s imaginations. Before inventing Crayola crayons, the partners patented a “dustless chalk,” a red oxide paint, and Staonal — “stay-on-all” — the blackest of black markers.
Three decades after America’s first oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, Crayola crayons began with an 1881 refining patent by Edwin Binney to make carbon black, an intensely black pigment. Binney and partner C. Harold Smith had launched their company in Easton to sell inks, black polishes, and chalk for schoolroom blackboards.
Binney & Smith Company received an 1891 patent for an “Apparatus for the Manufacture of Carbon Black,” which produced a fine, soot-like black pigment — far better than any other in use.
Pennsylvania’s booming oilfields would prove key to success, beginning with using natural gas in a patented “Apparatus for the Manufacture of Carbon Black.” Binney & Smith Company later would add oilfield paraffin — the bane of oil producers since it clogged wells — and mix in colors to create a petroleum product named Crayola.
Manufacturing Carbon Black
On May 28, 1891, Binney received a patent for the company’s method to efficiently produce a fine, soot-like substance more intensely black than any other pigment in use at the time.
“The objects of my invention are to manufacture lamp-black from oil in an improved and economical manner, whereby waste of the product and unnecessary expenditure of labor are avoided,” Binney noted in his patent application.
His patent (No. 453,140) proclaimed a process to “manufacture carbon-black from gas in such a manner as to obtain improved quality of black which shall have the soft flaky texture of lamp-black made in ordinary ways.”
A fifth-grader’s skillful use of crayons illustrates oil production. Image courtesy Pioneer Oil Museum of New York, Bolivar.
The young U.S. petroleum industry, rapidly expanding its refineries to fuel kerosene for lamps, supplied Binney & Smith with oil and natural gas feedstock for the company’s carbon black. Revolving metal drums cooled the heat and smoke directed from the burning gas.
“Stay on All”
The company’s refining process produced a fine, soot-like substance of incredible blackness — a better pigment than any other. Binney & Smith’s carbon black received an award at the 1900 Paris Exposition, a world’s fair of the century’s achievements.
Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania inventors mixed their carbon black product with oilfield paraffin and other waxes to introduce a paper-wrapped black crayon marker for crates and barrels. The company promoted the marker as being able to “stay on all” and accordingly named “Staonal.”
Resulting from an 1891 carbon black patent, Binney & Smith added oilfield paraffin to produce a black marker. Staonal is still sold.
Staonal became a highly successful company product, but the concentrated carbon black content precluded its use by children. The company earlier had found great success manufacturing “dustless chalk” for schoolrooms and red iron oxide for a red paint for barns.
Classroom Chalk
Although they longed for color, students in Alice Stead Binney’s classroom had to settle for dustless chalk. In fact, An-Du-Septic dustless chalk proved so popular among turn-of-the-century teachers that it won a Gold Medal at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.
Teachers like Alice loved the tidy new product, but their choices were limited. Pencils of the day were primitive, with square “leads” made from a variety of clays, slates, and graphite. Color writing implements were the toxic and expensive imports of artists, best kept away from schoolchildren.
Experiments in 1902 produced An-Du-Septic, a white dustless chalk soon popular with teachers. Photo courtesy Benny and Smith Company.
Alice’s husband Edwin, and his cousin, C. Harold Smith, created An-Du-Septic chalk as a consequence of expanding their pigment business into the sideline production of slate pencils for schools.
In Easton, the Binney & Smith Company, formerly the Peekskill Chemical Works, made its reputation by producing a red iron oxide for paint and carbon black for paints, inks, and iron stoves. Binney & Smith also produced shoe polishes. School teachers and their students would bring change.
Slate pencils and the very successful An-Du-Septic dustless chalk put Binney & Smith salesmen into America’s classrooms. The company’s sales force listened to teachers and learned there would be a ready market for inexpensive, non-toxic, brightly colored crayons.
“Crayola” from Oilfield Paraffin
In 1903, Binney & Smith launched a colorful product that would forever change childhoods. Alice Binney provided the name by combining the French word for chalk, craie, with the Old French word oléagineux — meaning something that contains oil.
The manufacturing process began with mixing small batches of carefully measured and hand-mixed pigments, paraffin, talc and other waxes. Employees individually rolled paper labels and pasted them onto each crayon by hand.
Identically packed into small boxes, thousands easily could be shipped in wooden crates. Sixteen Crayola crayons sold for 10 cents; eight for 5 cents: red, yellow, orange, green, blue, violet, black, and brown. Crayola became an instant hit.
Binney and Smith produced the first box of eight Crayola crayons in 1903 — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, brown, and black.
The company’s proprietary formulas have remained a closely guarded secret as demand for its crayons has grown worldwide. Production capacity reportedly is more than four million crayons every day, thanks to oilfield paraffin from distant petroleum refineries delivered to Crayola’s Easton factory in railroad tank cars.
In January 2007, Binney & Smith became Crayola LLC in recognition of the company’s number one brand. The company is now known as Crayola. Crayola has grown to become a $500 million a year business — a successful union of the petroleum industry to the colorful world of children’s imaginations.
“This organizational and name change showcases the company’s Crayola brand, sold by Binney & Smith since 1903,” explained the company, which also opened a museum in Easton. Crayola is sold in more than 80 countries, “and represents innovation, fun, kids and quality.”
As paraffin continued to find its way into products (see The Crude History of Mabel’s Eyelashes), manufacturers in 1912 for the first time added Binney & Smith’s carbon black to tires. Until the addition of carbon black to improve durability, auto tires were white.
Carbon Black Hits the Road
In 1839, bankrupt Philadelphia hardware merchant and erstwhile inventor Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped rubber and sulfur on a hot stovetop. The rubber charred like leather yet remained elastic, a discovery that led to “vulcanization.”
During the new process, natural rubber could be transformed into an industrial product with innumerable uses. Goodyear’s famous lawyer, Daniel Webster, praised his client’s invention. “It introduces quite a new material into the manufacture of the arts, that material being nothing less than elastic metal,” Webster proclaimed.
Automobile tires were the ideal application for this new product. Between 1895 and 1905, more than 77,000 new automobiles were registered in the United States (See Cantankerous Combustion — First U.S. Auto Show).
The tires of this 1904 Oldsmobile Model N Touring Runabout were not chosen for their color. Until B.F. Goodrich introduced “carbon black” into the vulcanizing process in 1910, auto tires were white.
Natural rubber pigments and zinc oxide used in the manufacturing process gave tires their while color. At the time, most cities had a downtown maximum speed limit of 10 mph.
In 1910, the B.F. Goodrich Company found that adding carbon black to the vulcanizing process dramatically improved strength and durability. The material came from controlled combustion of both oil and natural gas. Its use in tires created an immense market — initially consuming one pound of carbon black for every two pounds of rubber.
Correspondingly, as America’s automobile industry grew, so did demand for tires and carbon black. By 1931, Texas annually produced more than 200 million pounds of carbon black from just 31 plants — about 75 percent of America’s total production.
Today, most of America’s carbon black is still produced in Texas and Louisiana. Demand remains closely associated with auto tires. Cabot Corporation — founded in Pennsylvania in 1882 — is the largest U.S. producer of the intensely black petroleum product. By 2024, the company operated 43 manufacturing facilities in more than 20 countries.
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Recommended Reading: Crayola Creators: Edward Binney and C. Harold Smith, Toy Trailblazers
(2016); Carbon Black, Its Manufacture, Properties, and Uses (2018); The B.F. Goodrich Story Of Creative Enterprise 1870-1952
(2010). Your Amazon purchases benefit the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an annual AOGHS supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. © 2025 Bruce A. Wells.
Citation Information – Article Title: “’Carbon Black & Oilfield Crayons.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/products/oilfield-paraffin. Last Updated: May 22, 2025. Original Published Date: September 1, 2007.
by Bruce Wells | May 19, 2025 | Petroleum History Almanac
Less than 10 months after Edwin L. Drake and his driller William “Uncle Billy” Smith completed the first commercial U.S. oil well on August 27, 1859, along Oil Creek in Titusville, Pennsylvania, Thomas A. Gale wrote a detailed study about rock oil — and helped launch the petroleum age.
Published in 1860, The Wonder of the Nineteenth Century: Rock Oil in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere described a radical fuel source for the popular lamp fuel kerosene, which had been made from coal for more than a decade.
“Those who have not seen it burn may rest assured its light is no moonshine; but something nearer the clear, strong, brilliant light of day,” Gale declared in his 25-cent pamphlet printed in Erie by Sloan & Griffith Company.
Thomas Gale’s 80-page pamphlet in 1860 marked the beginning of the petroleum age, illuminated with kerosene lamps.
“In other words, rock oil emits a dainty light; the brightest and yet the cheapest in the world; a light fit for Kings and Royalists, and not unsuitable for Republicans and Democrats,” Gale added.
Oil in Rocks
Gale’s descriptions of the value of petroleum helped launch investments in new exploration companies, especially as he noted the commercial qualities of Pennsylvania oil for refining into kerosene, the distilled “coal oil” invented in 1848 by Canadian chemist Abraham Gesner.
Historians regard the 80-page publication as the first book about America’s petroleum industry. The Wonder of the Nineteenth Century: Rock Oil in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere was almost forgotten until 1952, when the Ethyl Corporation of New York republished the work. Only three original copies were known to exist.
“Not by the widest stretch of the imagination could Thomas Gale have realized, when he put down his pen on June 1, 1860, that he had written a book destined to become one of the rarest of all oil books,” proclaimed the Ethyl historian when the company republished Gale’s book.
Ethyl Corporation noted the scarcity of copies of the book had prevented “all but a few historians” from giving the book the attention it deserved.
“Gale wrote his book to satisfy a public desire for more information about petroleum. Newspapers had carried belated accounts of Drake’s discovery well, and the mad scramble for oil that followed, but actually the world knew little about petroleum.”
“The Rock poured…”
The book’s 11 chapters explain practical aspects of the new petroleum industry. Chapters one and two, “What is Rock Oil?” and “Where is the Rock Oil found?” were followed by “Geological Structure of the Oil Region.”
Chapters four through six explained the early technologies (and costs) for pumping the oil, while the next two chapters examine “Uses of Rock Oil.” The final three chapters offered “Sketches of several oil wells,” “History of the Rock Oil Enterprise,” and “Present condition and prospects of Rock Oil interests in different localities.”
Chapter three in The Wonder of the Nineteenth Century: Rock Oil in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere features the “geological structure of the oil region,” today part of Oil Creek State Park in northwestern Pennsylvania.
Originally published by Sloan & Griffith of Erie, Pennsylvania, the 1860 cover noted the author as “a resident of Oil Creek” and included a biblical quote, “The Rock poured me out rivers of oil,” from Job, 29:6.
In addition to mysteriously burning gasses and “tar pits,” explorers for millennia have referenced signs of coal, bitumen, and substances very much like petroleum — a word derived from the Latin roots of petra, meaning “rock” and oleum meaning “oil.”
But did Thomas Gayle’s 1860 work produce the first book about oil as Ethyl Corporation historians believed when the company reprinted it in 1952? In fact, there have been many references to natural oil seeps recorded millennia ago (including in the Bible), according to a geologist who has researched the earliest sightings of petroleum.
Illuminating Petroleum
Several years before the 1859 oil discovery in Pennsylvania, businessman George Bissell hired a prominent Yale chemist to study the potential of oil and its products to convince potential investors (see George Bissell’s Oil Seeps).
“Gentlemen, it appears to me that there is much ground for encouragement in the belief that your company have in their possession a raw material from which, by simple and not expensive processes, they may manufacture very valuable products,” reported Benjamin Silliman Jr. in 1855.
Silliman’s groundbreaking “Report on the Rock Oil, or Petroleum, from Venango Co., Pennsylvania, with Special Reference to its Use for Illumination and Other Purposes,” convinced the petroleum industry’s earliest investors to drill at Titusville. Cable-tool technology developed for brine wells would drill the well.
According to historian Paul H. Giddens in the 1939 classic, The Birth of the Oil Industry, Silliman’s 1855 report, “proved to be a turning-point in the establishment of the petroleum business, for it dispelled many doubts about its value.”
The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company would evolve into the Seneca Oil Company of New Haven, Connecticut, which became America’s first oil company after Drake completed the first U.S. commercial well drilled seeking oil in 1859.
Rock Oil Products
In addition to providing oil for refining into kerosene lamps (and someday rockets), oilfield discoveries led to many products. Early petroleum products included axle greases, an oilfield paraffin balm, and in Easton, Pennsylvania, Crayola crayons.
Further, oil offered an improved asphalt prior to the first U.S. auto show in November 1900 in New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
Ethyl Corporation was established in 1923 by General Motors and Standard Oil of New Jersey,
Responding to consumer demand for better automobile gasoline, General Motors and Standard Oil of New Jersey established the Ethyl Corporation in 1923. The company initially downplayed the danger of tetraethyl lead. Leaded gas would be banned for use in cars in the 1970s
Importantly, high-octane leaded aviation fuel proved vital for victory in World War II — and the additive still fuels many piston-engine aircraft and racecars.
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Recommended Reading: The Wonder of the Nineteenth Century: Rock Oil in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere (1952); The Birth of the Oil Industry (1939); Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry
(2009). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells.
Citation Information – Article Title: “First Oil Book of 1860.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/oil-almanac/first-oil-book-of-1860. Last Updated: May 17, 2025. Original Published Date: May 31, 2020.
by Bruce Wells | May 19, 2025 | Petroleum Pioneers
Oilfield discovered in May 1940 — after 57 years of unsuccessful searches for a “vein of petroleum.”
Pawnee Royalty Company completed a successful wildcat oil well in Nebraska’s Richardson County on May 1940, after lawmakers in Lincoln, eager for petroleum tax revenue, offered a $15,000 bounty.
After more than a hal-century of drilling expensive “dry holes,” Nebraska’s first commercial oil well arrived on May 29, 1940, in the far southeastern corner of the state. The Pawnee Royalty Company made the discovery west of Falls City. The company had drilled two unsuccessful wells near Falls City in 1939.
Nebraska’s oil production reached more than 2.51 million barrels of oil in 2012 (above), but declined to about 1.71 million barrels of oil by 2021, according to the Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
A historical marker in Richardson County reports the earliest “publicized report of oil in Nebraska had been an 1883 newspaper account of a ‘vein of petroleum’ discovered in the same county.”
“Over the next 57 years the search for oil consumed thousands of dollars, and hundreds of wells were drilled throughout Nebraska,” adds the marker, erected by the Nebraska Petroleum Council. “Traces of oil were reported at various locations across the state, but Nebraska did not have a producing well until 1940.”
Oil Discovery Bounty
Eager to become an oil-producing state, the Nebraska legislature had offered a $15,000 bonus for any oil well in Nebraska to produce 50 barrels daily for 60 consecutive days. Florida lawmakers, also eager for oil revenue, would do the same (see First Florida Oil Well).
Circa 1940s postcard depicts a “pool of oil” produced by the Bucholz Well No. 1 near Falls City, Nebraska.
Although unsuccessful, the two earlier Pawnee Royalty Company wells had shown encouraging signs near Falls City. A third well, Bucholz No. 1, began drilling on April 22, 1940.
“On May 29, 1940, the well began producing and averaged 169-1/2 barrels daily for the first 60 days,” notes the historic marker. “Bucholz Well No. 1 thus easily qualified for a $15,000 bonus.”
Richardson County enjoyed a drilling boom for three years. The state’s first successful oil well was completed five miles east of the county’s “vein of petroleum” first reported in 1883.
SW Nebraska Oilfields
More Nebraska petroleum production would come from the southwestern panhandle. A 1949 discovery well produced 225 barrels of oil a day from a depth of 4,429 feet. Marathon Oil completed the well, the Mary Egging No. 1, five miles southeast of Gurley in Cheyenne County.
The Marathon oil discovery in western Nebraska ended 60 years of drilling expensive “dry holes” in that part of the state, according to a roadside marker on U.S. 385 between Sidney and Gurley.
According to the marker, interest in finding oil in western Nebraska began in 1889, near Crawford, in the northwest corner of the Nebraska Panhandle, and “drilling there took place in 1903 near Chadron, also in the northern part of the Panhandle.”
Prior to 1950, Nebraska had no office to report production for record keeping. Oil production from 1939 to 1949 is estimated by the Geological Survey to have been almost six million barrels.
A 1917 exploratory well, “drilled in the southwest Panhandle, near Harrisburg, failed,” the marker adds. “Oil searchers sunk many other dry test wells in western Nebraska until success came in 1949.”
New Technologies
By 1966, wells in the western Nebraska oilfields produced more than 216 million barrels of oil. “The pioneer efforts in this area have resulted in a major contribution to the economy of the state,” concludes the Nebraska State Historical Society.
New technologies, including horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, brought renewed activity to Nebraska in the 2000s. Exploration company geologists began testing the Niobrara Shale in the southwestern part of the state.
Nebraska’s annual production declined in 2023 to about 1.5 million barrels of oil, which was the lowest level since 1950, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Production peaked in 1962 at almost 25 million barrels.
Learn about the earliest oilfield discoveries in other petroleum-producing states in First Oil Discoveries.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. © 2025 Bruce A. Wells.
Citation Information – Article Title: “First Nebraska Oil Well.” Author: Aoghs.org Editors. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL:https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/first-nebraska-oil-well. Last Updated: May 23, 2025. Original Published Date: May 26, 2013.
by Bruce Wells | May 17, 2025 | Petroleum Pioneers
West Texas discoveries in the 1920s revealed a petroleum expanse 250 miles wide and 300 miles long.
A West Texas oil well blessed by nuns revealed the true size of the petroleum-rich Permian Basin in 1923. A small university in Austin owned the arid land, which had been deemed mostly worthless by experts.
Successful exploration of the Permian Basin, once known as a “petroleum graveyard,” began in February 1920 with a discovery by William H. Abrams in Mitchell County in West Texas. When completed after “shooting” the well with nitroglycerin in July, production averaged 20 barrels of oil a day.
In 1958, the University of Texas moved the Santa Rita No. 1 well’s walking beam and other equipment to the Austin campus. The student newspaper described the well, “as one that made the difference between pine-shack classrooms and modern buildings.” Photo from 2007 by Bruce Wells.
The W.H. Abrams No. 1 oilfield discovery well of the Permian Basin would lead to the area’s first commercial oil pipeline in the Permian Basin, according to a Texas Historical Commission historic marker placed near the well in 1996 (reported missing in 2020).
Meanwhile, even with its limited production, the Abrams well began attracting oil exploration to the barren region.
West Texas Oil
It would be another Permian Basin discovery well that launched a stampede of wildcatters to explore the full 300-mile extent of the basin from West Texas into southeastern New Mexico.
Geologists remained unconvinced the Permian Basin contained commercial amounts of petroleum until the Santa Rita No. 1 well tapped a vast oilfield. The well, drilled by Texon Oil and Land Company near Big Lake, Texas, struck oil on May 28, 1923. The discovery came on land leased from the University of Texas.
It had not been easy for Texon Oil and Land Company. The well required 21 months of cable-tool drilling that averaged less than five feet per day to reach a total depth of 3,055 feet. Once completed, the well produced for the next 70 years.
Because state legislators had given the land and mineral rights to the University of Texas when it opened in 1883, the oilfield’s royalties would endow the University of Texas with $4 million.
Discovery of the Big Lake oil field in 1923 led to many boom towns, including Midland, which some called “Little Dallas.”
The Texas Board of Regents moved Santa Rita’s drilling equipment to the campus in 1958, “In order that it may stand as a symbol of a great era in the history of the university.” After the dedication, the student newspaper of the day described the well “as one that made the difference between pine-shack classrooms and modern buildings.”
Santa Rita No. 1
The historic well’s oil discovery began in 1919 when attorney and oil speculator Rupert Ricker applied to lease rights on more than 430,000 acres of arid land designated by the state for the financing of the University of Texas. As time ran out to pay a filing fee of about $43,000, Ricker failed to raise money from Fort Worth investors.
“Nobody seemed to have any interest in the deal so with the deadline looming he sold the entire scheme to El Pasoans Frank T. Pickrell and Haymon Krupp for the sum of $2,500,” noted a 2017 article in the Permian Basin Petroleum Association Magazine.
The two men had served in the same Army company during World War I. Their Santa Rita No. 1 well near Big Lake started “making hole” shortly before midnight on August 17, 1921 — on the last day before the 18-month drilling permit expired.
A 2007 University of Texas exhibit featured original Santa Rita cable-tool drilling equipment at San Jacinto Boulevard and 19th Street on the Austin campus. Photo by Bruce Wells.
Pickrell hired an experienced Pennsylvania driller, Carl Cromwell, to drill Texon Oil and Land’s test well. Cromwell had been born in 1889 not far from the first commercial U.S. oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
Nuns and Roses
At the time, West Texas drilling crews, when available, “consisted mostly of cowboy roustabouts who were distinguished for high absenteeism and steady turnover,” notes one historian. The well often needed to be shut down because of a lack of cash to pay salaries or buy supplies.
Several months after the start of drilling, an increasingly concerned Pickrell climbed the derrick. At the top, he threw handfuls of rose petals that a group of Catholic women investors from New York had given him.
Pickrell christened his wildcat well for the church’s Patroness of Impossible Causes — Santa Rita. On May 25, 1923, early signs of oil and natural gas appeared. Three days later, Santa Rita No. 1 roared in as a West Texas gusher.
People as far away as Fort Worth traveled to see the well. Much-needed casing and other well equipment arrived a month later to bring the wild well under control, and the first commercial well in the Permian Basin went into production.
The Big Lake field — at 4.5 square miles — revealed that vast oil reserves in West Texas came from both shallow and deep formations. Exploration spread into other areas of the Permian Basin, still one of the largest oil-producing regions in the United States.
In the fall of 1923, Pickrell found an important investor, Michael L. Benedum, the highly successful independent oilman from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Benedum and another Pittsburgh wildcatter, Joseph Trees, purchased Texon properties and formed the Big Lake Oil Company in 1924.
Big Lake Oilfield
The new company’s president, Levi Smith, would be instrumental in creating Big Lake — the first oil company town in the Permian Basin. Santa Rita No. 1 well, capped in May 1990, would be remembered with a replica erected in Reagan County Park.
The Big Lake oilfield proved to be 4.5 square miles and demonstrated that vast oil reserves in West Texas came from both shallow and deep horizons. Exploration spread into other areas of the Permian Basin, which would become one of the largest oil-producing regions in the United States.
Learn the story of the Permian Basin at the Petroleum Museum in Midland. Not far from the museum, in Odessa, an Ector County historical marker notes “the first Permian Basin dry hole” drilled in 1924.
Pennsylvania independent operators drilled the well to 900 feet and found only “Red Bed” rock, notes the 1965 marker. The 1924 well would be abandoned, but by 1964 Ector County would have 9,600 oil wells.
Hollywood at Big Lake
The 2002 movie “The Rookie” was filmed almost entirely in West Texas. It featured a Big Lake high-school teacher played by Dennis Quaid, who despite being in his mid-30s briefly makes it to the major leagues.
The opening scenes of the 2002 movie “The Rookie” included Catholic nuns christening the wildcat well with rose petals.
As the well is being drilled, Catholic nuns are shown carrying a basket of rose petals to christen it for the patron Saint of the Impossible – Santa Rita.
Learn more about baseball teams fielded by petroleum “company towns” in Oilfields of Dreams.
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Recommended Reading: Santa Rita: The University of Texas Oil Discovery
(1958); Chronicles of an Oil Boom: Unlocking the Permian Basin
(2014). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
_______________________
The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. © 2025 Bruce A. Wells.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Santa Rita taps Permian Basin.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/west-texas-petroleum. Last Updated: May 22, 2024. Original Published Date: November 1, 2004.
by Bruce Wells | May 15, 2025 | Petroleum Transportation
Famous 1880s New York World reporter took charge of Iron Clad Manufacturing Company.
She was one of the most famous journalists of her day as a reporter for the New York World. Widely known as the remarkable Nellie Bly, Elizabeth J. Cochran Seaman, investigated conditions at an infamous mental institution, made a trip around the world in less than 80 days — and manufactured the first practical 55-gallon oil drum.
The 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., promoted her Iron Clad Manufacturing Company as “owned exclusively by Nellie Bly – the only woman in the world personally managing industries of such magnitude.”
Recognizing the potential of an efficient metal barrel design, Nellie Bly acquired the 1905 patent rights from its inventor, Henry Wehrhahn, who worked at her Iron Clad Manufacturing Company.
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