by Bruce Wells | May 6, 2025 | Energy Education Resources
Preserving Louisiana petroleum history at Caddo Lake.
A 1905 oil discovery at Caddo-Pines brought America’s rapidly growing petroleum industry to northwestern Louisiana. A state museum in appropriately named Oil City tells the story.
Originally the Caddo-Pine Island Oil and Historical Museum, in May 2004 the Louisiana State Oil and Gas Museum was dedicated as a state museum under the Louisiana Secretary of State.
Gulf Refining Company in 1911 built drilling platforms to reach the oil beneath Caddo Lake, Louisiana. The early “offshore” technologies worked, and production continues today.
Located about 20 miles north of Shreveport, the first public museum in Louisiana dedicated to the petroleum industry maintains an extensive local history library and collected photographic archives. Exterior exhibits include the former depot of the Kansas City Southern Railroad. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | May 6, 2025 | Energy Education Resources
Museums in Bartlesville and Ponca City have preserved Oklahoma exploration and production history. One still does.
As part of Oklahoma statehood centennial celebrations in 2007, ConocoPhillips opened two petroleum museums dedicated to preserving the state’s exploration and production history. In April 2025, the spun-off downstream company Phillips 66 closed the museum in Bartlesville, citing a decline in visitors after an earlier decision to require appointment-only visits.
Often staffed with volunteers like many other Oklahoma oil museums, the Conoco Museum in Ponca City and Phillips Petroleum Company museum in Bartlesville have featured interactive exhibits, oilfield artifacts, and community events along with K-12 education programs about the industry’s energy future.
Created in 2002 through the merger of Conoco and the Phillips Petroleum, ConocoPhillips reportedly spent $5 million on each museum for the 2007 centennial openings. In 2012, ConocoPhillips separated its refinery, chemical and pipeline assets to create the separate, independent company of Phillips 66.
The permanent closure of the Bartlesville Phillips Petroleum Company Museum (with some artifacts moving to the Frank Phillip Woolaroc Ranch) has left an uncertain future for the statehood centennial’s Conoco Museum, now requiring appointments to visit.
(more…)
by Bruce Wells | Mar 17, 2025 | Energy Education Resources
Biography of father of U.S. oil industry reaches total depth.
In August 1859, the man who would launch America’s petroleum industry was down to his last pennies — and a letter was on its way to “Colonel” Edwin L. Drake telling him to cease drilling at Titusville, Pennsylvania. Investors in the first oil company wanted him wanted out.
“As far as the company was concerned, the project was finished,” notes historian William Brice, PhD, in his 2009 biography of Drake, a former railroad conductor. “Fortunately that letter was not delivered until after they found oil.” (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Mar 12, 2025 | Energy Education Resources
Petroleum geologist and postcard collector drills into exploration and production history.
For anyone interested in learning more about Texas oil and natural gas history and oilfield photography found in vintage postcards, a book by petroleum geologist Jeff A. Spencer offers both in 128 pages. Published by Arcadia Publishing in 2013, Texas Oil and Gas is a gusher of information, images, and a valuable resource for teaching social studies.
Published in 2013, Texas Oil and Gas is part of Arcadia Publishing’s series of books featuring historic oil-patch postcards.
A longtime geologist in the Houston area, Spencer has authored or co-authored more than 20 oilfield history papers. His petroleum-related vintage postcard collection includes images from West Virginia, California, Ontario, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and of course Texas. The majority of the book’s more than 200 images are from the author’s private collection. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Mar 1, 2025 | Energy Education Resources
Oklahoma museum opened in 2011 to preserve history of Sooners and the American West.
The Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center (CSRHC) in Enid, Oklahoma, preserves the history of the settling the Cherokee Strip — and the search for petroleum in northwestern Oklahoma. The museum opened in 2011 following six years of work by many Enid residents, including a leading independent producer.
Hundreds gathered for the April 1, 2011, opening of the $10 million Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center on the east side of Enid, Oklahoma.
Overlooking a Chisholm Trail watering hole, CSRHC stands on “one of the most meaningful spots in the history of the American West” and includes the Humphrey Heritage Village, site of the only remaining U.S. Land Office from the 1893 Cherokee Strip Land Run.
Staking a claim to a piece of land on the day of the land run was a hard journey for those who poured over the border on September 16, 1893. Known as the Cherokee Outlet Opening or the Cherokee Strip Land Run, it followed the more famous first land run into unassigned lands of former Indian Territory on April 22, 1889.
CSRHC Chairman Llewellyn “Lew” O. Ward III (1930-2016) addressed a crowd gathered at the latest cultural addition to Enid on April 1, 2011. “Opening the heritage center is the closing of one chapter, but just the beginning of another to fulfill our pledge of claiming our past and inspiring our future,” announced Ward, who was instrumental in establishing the facility.
The $10 million center’s opening followed six years of dedicated work, explained the independent producer, who died in March 2016 after leading state and national industry associations and receiving many lifetime achievement awards. “Exhibits and programs will make a significant impact on future generations,” explained Ward, who in 1963 founded Ward Petroleum in Enid.
Ward, a past chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), was presented the industry’s Chief Roughneck Award (1955 to 2019) by Lone Star Steel during the IPAA annual meeting in 1999. The American Oil and Gas Historical Society declared him an exceptional “oil patch preservationist” during its 2007 Energy Education Conference in Oklahoma City.
The Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center includes a 1927 portable drilling rig created by petroleum technology pioneer George E. Failing, who added a drilling rig to a Ford farm truck. The same engine that drove the sturdy truck across the oilfields was used to power its rotary drill.
Thanks to Ward’s commitment to building the facility, the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center Inc. was created in 2005 through partnerships with the Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS), the Sons & Daughters of the Cherokee Strip Pioneers Association, and the Phillips University Legacy Foundation.
CSHHC Chairman Lew O. Ward (1939-2018) spoke at the 2011 opening. Ward served on the boards of the National Petroleum Council and the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma
The former heritage museum at the eastern edge of Enid became a property of the Oklahoma Historical Society in 1976 and is now the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center, including the library.
Ward noted the new center’s oral history library contains more than 260 interviews capturing the stories of the Cherokee Strip from those who have lived them. “This growing library is an invaluable component of historical research for our region,” he added.
“Trained staff and volunteers collect the oral histories of people from the Cherokee Strip and Northwest Oklahoma,” Ward said. “The interviews are then transcribed and made available to the public and for use in the Research Center.”
Further, a the center has hosted teachers seminars on the Enid campus of Northwestern Oklahoma State University, according to Ward. The seminar explained to teaches how to incorporate lessons of leadership into their curriculum through the study of history,” he explained.
In November 2013, the center was selected by the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board (OERB) to partner in the statewide school education programs — OERB Homeroom.
In 1917, Herbert H. Champlin purchased a small refinery on the outskirts of Enid. By 1944 his company operated service stations in 20 states.
OERB spends millions of dollars annually to provide teacher training, curricula and programs that bring the petroleum industry to classrooms across the state — and offers free field trips to selected museums. “We are thrilled that the Heritage Center has been chosen to partner with OERB in their school education program,” said Museum Director Andi Holland in 2011.
“The heritage center’s Dave Donaldson Oil and Gas Gallery is well equipped marking the beginnings of oil and gas production in the Cherokee Strip through its economic importance to Northwestern Oklahoma today,” Holland added. The center’s gallery includes a series of interactive features about how natural resources are found, produced and refined.
A program already created by the heritage center’s education department is called “Boom and Bust, Natural Resources in the Cherokee Strip,” said Cody Jolliff, the Enid museum’s education director.
“This partnership will allow more students to attend the heritage center and learn more about Northwest Oklahoma and the rich natural resources that impact our lives,” Jolliff added.
Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center exhibits include: The Outlet – Learn about life before the land run, and how the run changed the course of history; The Land & the People Gallery – Hear the stories of settlers in the years after they staked their claims.
Also among the exhibits, the Thelma Gungoll Phillips University Gallery – Celebrate the founding and history of the first private university in the state.
The Dave Donaldson Oil & Gas Gallery offers a Champlin Oil exhibit. “The Champlin Refining Company, which for many years held the distinction of being the nation’s largest fully integrated oil company under private ownership, was based at Enid,” according to the Oklahoma Historical Society.
The Sooner State’s petroleum industry began one decade before statehood with an 1897 oilfield discovery near a trading post called Bartlesville.
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Recommended Reading: Oil in Oklahoma
(1976); Oil And Gas In Oklahoma: Petroleum Geology In Oklahoma
(2013); The Oklahoma Petroleum Industry
(1980). 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 preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter today and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/cherokee-strip-regional-heritage-center. Last Updated: March 28, 2025. Original Published Date: June 1, 2011.
by Bruce Wells | Feb 3, 2025 | Energy Education Resources
Growing oil demand challenged petroleum geologists, who organized a professional association.
As demand for petroleum grew during World War I, the science for finding oil and natural gas reserves remained obscure when a small group of geologists in 1917 organized what became the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG).
AAPG began as the Southwestern Association of Petroleum Geologists in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after about 90 geologists gathered at Henry Kendall College, now Tulsa University. They formed an association of earth scientists on February 10, 1917, “to which only reputable and recognized petroleum geologists are admitted.”
AAPG members maintain a professional business code.
Rapidly multiplying mechanized technologies of the “Great War” brought desperation to finding and producing vast supplies of oil. America entered the First War I two months after AAPG’s founding. An October 1917 giant oilfield discovery at Ranger, Texas, inspired a British War Cabinet member to declare, “The Allied cause floated to victory upon a wave of oil.”
Rock Hounds
In January 1918, the AAPG convention of in Oklahoma City reported 167 active members and 17 associate members. After adopting its present name one year after organizing at Henry Kendall College, the group issued its first technical bulletin, using papers and presentations delivered at the 1917 Tulsa meeting.
The professional “rock hounds” produced a mission statement that included promoting the science of geology, especially relating to oil and natural gas. The geologists also committed to encouraging “technology improvements in the methods of exploring for and exploiting these substances.”
AAPG was founded in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at Henry Kendall College — today’s Tulsa University.
AAPG also began publishing a bimonthly journal that remains among the most respected in the industry. The peer-reviewed Bulletin included papers written by leading geologists of the day.
With a subscription price of five dollars, the journal was distributed to members, university libraries, and other industry professionals.
Finding Faults and Anticlines
By 1920, one petroleum trade magazine — after complaining of the industry’s lack of skilled geologists — noted the “Association Grows in Membership and Influence; Combats the Fakers.”
The article praised AAPG professionalism and warned of “the large number of unscrupulous and inadequately prepared men who are attempting to do geological work.”
Similarly, the Oil Trade Journal praised AAPG for its commitment “to censor the great mass of inadequately prepared and sometimes unscrupulous reports on geological problems, which are wholly misleading to the industry.”
Perhaps the best known such fabrication is related to the men behind the 1930 East Texas oilfield discovery — a report entitled “Geological, Topographical And Petroliferous Survey, Portion of Rusk County, Texas, Made for C.M. Joiner by A.D. Lloyd, Geologist And Petroleum Engineer.”
Using very scientific terminology, A.D. Lloyd’s document described Rusk County geology — its anticlines, faults, and a salt dome — all features associated with substantial oil deposits…and all completely fictitious.
The fabrications nevertheless attracted investors, allowing Joiner and “Doc” Lloyd to drill a well that uncovered a massive oil field, still the largest conventional oil reservoir in the lower-48 states.
AAPG’s peer-reviewed journal first appeared in 1918, one year after the association’s first meeting in Tulsa.
Equally imaginative science came from Lloyd’s earlier descriptions of the “Yegua and Cook Mountain” formations and the thousands of seismographic registrations he ostensibly recorded. Lloyd, a former patent medicine salesman, and other self-proclaimed geologists, were the antithesis of the AAPG professional ethic.
In 1945, AAPG formed a “Committee on Boy Scout Literature” to assist the Boy Scouts of America in updating requirements for the “mining” badge, which had been awarded since 1911 (learn more in Merit Badge for Geology).
By 1953, AAPG membership had grown to more than 10,000 and a permanent headquarters building opened Tulsa. The association’s 2022 membership included about 40,000 members in 129 countries in the upstream energy industry, “who collaborate — and compete — to provide the means for humankind to thrive.”
The world’s largest professional geological society, a nonprofit organization, maintains a membership code to assure “integrity, business ethics, personal honor, and professional conduct.”
Oil Patch Historians
Longtime AAPG member Ray Sorenson, a Tulsa-based consulting geologist, has made numerous presentations about the history of petroleum. After publishing papers in leading academic journals, he adapted many of his contributions for the association’s 2007 Discovery Series, “First Impressions: Petroleum Geology at the Dawn of the North American Oil Industry.”
Further, Sorenson continued to research and collect a vast amount of material documenting the earliest signs of oil — worldwide references to hydrocarbons earlier that the 1859 first U.S. oil well drilled by Edwin Drake in Pennsylvania.
Drake expert and geologist and historian William Brice, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, in 2009 published Myth, Legend, Reality – Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry. His 661-page epic was researched and written as part of the U.S. petroleum industry’s 150th anniversary (learn more in Edwin Drake and his Oil Well),
As part if AAPG’s 2017 centennial events, geologist Robbie Rice Gries published Anomalies: Pioneering Women in Petroleum Geology 1917-2017. Researched with help from AAPG volunteers, her 405-page book includes contributors’ personal stories, written correspondence, and photographs dating back to the early 1900s.
The stories in Gries’ book should be read by every petroleum geologist, geophysicist and petroleum engineer, according to independent producer Marlan Downey, founder of Roxanna Oil Company. “Partly for the pleasure of the sprightly told adventures, partly for a sense of history, and, significantly, because it engenders a proper respect towards all women professionals, forging their unique way in a ‘man’s world.’”
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Recommended Reading: Anomalies: Pioneering Women in Petroleum Geology 1917-2017 (2017); Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum (1975); Myth, Legend, Reality – Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry
(2009); The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1991); The Birth of the Oil Industry (1936). 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 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. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “AAPG – Geology Pros since 1917.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL:https://aoghs.org/energy-education-resources/aapg-geology-pros-since-1917. Last Updated: February 4, 2025. Original Published Date: April 29, 2014.
