by Bruce Wells | May 8, 2025 | Petroleum Pioneers
Pennsylvania drillers kept oil production from the 1882 Warren County well a closely guarded secret.
Every year in densely wooded Cherry Grove, Pennsylvania, community members celebrate a 19th-century oil well and its place in American petroleum history. Led by local and visiting oil patch historians in June 2024, the Cherry Grove Old Home and Community Day featured tours of the well that once shook global petroleum markets.
When daily oil production from the “Mystery Well” was revealed in 1882, oil prices plunged worldwide. The discovery well drilled on lot 646 in the wilderness of Warren County had been a closely guarded secret. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Apr 17, 2025 | Petroleum History Almanac
Standard Oil curbed the excitement of unruly speculators trading oil and pipeline certificates.
In a sign of the growing power of John D. Rockefeller at the end of the 19th century, Standard Oil Company brought a decisive end to Pennsylvania’s highly speculative — and often confusing — trading markets at oil exchanges.
On January 23, 1895, the Standard Oil Company’s purchasing agency in Oil City, Pennsylvania, notified independent oil producers it would only buy their oil at a price “as high as the markets of the world will justify” and not necessarily “the price bid on the oil exchange for certificate oil.” The action would bring an end to the “paper oil” markets of brokers and buyers.
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