Well at Nacogdoches produced 10 barrels of oil a day in 1866.
Lyne Taliaferro Barret completed the first Texas oil well on September 12, 1866, west of the Sabine River. His Nacogdoches County discovery well did not produce commercial quantities of oil; it lay dormant for nearly two decades until others returned to Barret’s oilfield.
In December 1859, less than four months after Edwin L. Drake’s first U.S. oil well drilled in Pennsylvania, a similarly determined petroleum explorer named Lyne (Lynis) Taliaferro Barret began searching in an East Texas area known as Oil Springs. (more…)
Abundant late-19th century natural gas supplies attracted manufacturers away from coal.
Natural gas discoveries of the 1880s revealed the giant Trenton Field in Indiana, which extended into Ohio. New pipelines and abundant gas supplies would attract manufacturing industries to the Midwest — where small towns competed with cities to attract new industries. It was an Indiana natural gas boom too good to last.(more…)
Looking for clay to make children’s cereal bowls, a geologist in 1939 discovered a giant Yazoo County oilfield.
The first major Mississippi oil well was drilled following a geological survey by a young geologist — who had sought a suitable Yazoo County clay to mold cereal bowls for children. “It all began quite independently of any search for oil,” noted an historian decades later.
Frederic F. Mellen worked for the Works Progress Administration in Yazoo County during the Great Depression. By February 1939, the 28-year-old geologist was supervising a minerals survey project, “to locate a suitable clay to mold cereal bowls and other utensils for an underprivileged children’s nursery.”
Frederic Mellen became president of the Mississippi Geological Survey in 1946. Images courtesy Mississippi Geological, Economic and Topographical Survey.
At Perry Creek, about a mile southwest of Tinsley, Mellen’s survey found a strata of Mississippi’s known Jackson formation. But the seam was 250 feet above where it was supposed to be. It was a salt dome structure, well known since Texas’ spectacular Spindletop Hill discovery in January 1901.
Mellen urged more seismographic testing. Natural gas had been produced in Mississippi in the mid-1920s, and the Jackson formation was persuasive evidence that oil could be found along Perry Creek. Indications in the Yazoo Clay suggested an anticlinal structure, according to Edgar Wesley Owen in Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum (1975).
“Although the favorable area had been leased by an oil company about 10 years earlier and relinquished after a seismic examination, the Survey issued a press release in April 1939 describing its findings and recommending that the structure be drilled,” Owen explained.
When published in the State Geological Bulletin on April 12, 1939, Mellen’s startling survey results prompted renewed interest in finding Mississippi’s first commercial oil deposits after decades of searching and hundreds of dry holes.
The Tinsley formation included, “a northward contour closure of at least 135 feet – a structure so favorable for oil and gas accumulation as to warrant further geologic sturdy and seismographic exploration,” the Bulletin press release proclaimed, adding that it “especially should it be further explored for the reason that it lies less than 35 miles north-west of the Jackson Gas Field.”
“Mississippi’s prospects of finding oil in commercial quantities were heightened yesterday,” proclaimed the Vicksburg Evening Post in 1939.
Union Producing Company of Houston, Texas, leased much of the area. Company landmen quickly acquired mineral rights to about 2,500 acres around Tinsley. As others rushed to find their own leases, Union Producing Company began seismographic testing, 10 miles southwest of Yazoo City.
Seismic data prompted the company to choose a drill site on the Green Crowder Woodruff family farm on Perry Creek (S.W. Corner, N.W. Quarter, Section 13, Township 10 North, Range 3 West).
On September 5, 1939, after six weeks of drilling, Union Producing completed the G.C. Woodruff No. 1 well at a depth of 4,560 feet. The well, which had shown signs of oil at the end of August, flowed at 235 barrels of oil a day from a sandstone later named the Woodruff Sand.
Within 35 days, drilling companies, investors, and speculators recorded more than $5 million in lease and purchase transactions.
Union Producing Company discovered the Tinsley oilfield at a depth of 4,560 feet.
“Almost eighty years to the day after the discovery of the famous Drake well on Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, the first commercially important oil pool in the southeastern states was discovered,” declared John S. Ezell in The Journal of Southern History, (Vol.18, No. 3, August 1952).
“Hotels are over-flowing, restaurants are overtaxed, map companies are dizzy from the rush of new business,” reported Oil Weekly, adding that “farmers are trying to obtain drilling clauses with leases, geophysical crews are slipping through the woods, and in every hotel lobby John Doe will tell you he has a sure-shot lease – for sale at the right price.”
Three weeks after the Woodruff No. 1 well was completed, Union Producing exported to Louisiana the first barrel of Mississippi crude oil, sending four tank cars carrying 8,000 gallons of oil from Tinsley Station to the Standard Oil Refinery at Baton Rouge.
Following the discovery, the Commercial Appeal of Memphis explained the well’s completion with “a drilling crew sets a ‘Christmas tree’ (drilling apparatus) in place.”
The Southland Company in 1940 constructed a small oil refinery at Crupp, seven miles southeast of Yazoo City, near the Illinois Central railroad freight line.
“The discovery and development of the largest oilfield in the southeastern states is an exciting part of Mississippi’s history,” proclaimed Mississippi State Geologist William H. Moore in 1974.
“The fact that this giant field was discovered through the application of basic geology, in an investigation not necessarily slated toward oil and gas exploration, is a tribute not only to the geologist making the discovery but to all geologists engaged in similar undertakings,” he added.
The Office of the Mississippi Geological, Economic and Topographical Survey, in 1974 published Moore’sTinsley Field 1939-1974, A Commemorative Bulletin. A Yazoo City newspaper editor was among his sources regarding the historic well.
“When the Tinsley oil field was discovered in August of 1939 Mississippians, and Yazooans in particular, thought at last Mississippi would mushroom in development as did Oklahoma and parts of Texas and Louisiana,” noted Norman Mott Jr., editor of the Yazoo City Herald in 1974.
“Yazoo City experienced a great deal of excitement and the chaos of the early days as the center of the beginning oil industry in the state,” Mott said. “Adding greatly to the dreams of an oil boom was the discovery in the spring of 1940 of the Pickens Field in eastern Yazoo County. However, Pickens was not another Tinsley.”
By June 1944, Mississippi had 388 wells producing in eight oilfields. Sid W. Richardson, an independent producer from Texas, discovered the prolific Gwinville oilfield in August.
Cumulative production from the Tinsley field alone would reach more than 224 million barrels of oil and 14.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas by 1997, according to theAmerican Association of Petroleum Geologists.
As of 2017, with secondary recovery through carbon-dioxide injection, the Tensely oilfield was still producing more than 6,000 barrels of oil a day, about eight percent of Mississippi’s total oil production.
Frederic Mellen (1911-1989) was a founding member in 1939 of the Mississippi Geological Society. In 1985, the society sponsored a summer field trip led by Mellen, “to traverse the very hillsides of Yazoo County that he had mapped 47 years previously in his discovery of the large surface anticline that later became the giant Tinsley field,” reported Stanley King in A Brief History Of The Mississippi Geological Society.
Learn about the earliest oilfield discoveries in other U.S. producing states in First Oil Discoveries.
Citation Information – Article Title: “First Mississippi Oil Well.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/first-mississippi-oil-well. Last Updated: August 30, 2024. Original Published Date: September 3, 2018.
Will wisely stipulated mineral rights should not be sold.
In 1917, the Tyndall-Wyoming Oil Company’s No. 1 Hogg well discovered oil south of Houston and ended a streak of dry holes dating back to 1901 — when former Texas Governor James S. Hogg first thought oil might be there and leased the land.
The Lone Star State’s 20th governor, “Big Jim” Hogg died in 1906 without witnessing the Texas drilling boom he helped launch. But his unwavering belief in finding oil in the Gulf Coast’s geologic salt domes would benefit the Texas petroleum industry.
The U.S. petroleum industry began in 1859 to meet demand for “Coal Oil” — the popular lamp fuel kerosene.
American oil history began in a valley along a creek in remote northwestern Pennsylvania. Today’s exploration and production industry was born on August 27, 1859, near Titusville when a well specifically drilled for oil found it.
Although crude oil had been found and bottled for medicine as early as 1814 in Ohio and in Kentucky in 1818, these had been drilled seeking brine. Drillers often used an ancient technology, the “spring pole” Sometimes the salt wells produced small amounts of oil, an unwanted byproduct.
Considered America’s first petroleum exploration company – the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company of New York – incorporated in 1854. It reorganized as Seneca Oil Company of New Haven Connecticut in 1858.
The advent of cable-tool drilling introduced the wooden derrick into the changing American landscape. The technology applied same basic idea of chiseling a hole deeper into the earth.
Using steam power, a variety of heavy bits, and clever mechanical engineering, cable-tool drillers continued to become more efficient. (Learn more Making Hole – Drilling Technology.) (more…)
Some considered self-taught geologist Pattillo Higgins “something of a fool” — until January 1o, 1901.
Self-taught geologist Patillo Higgins became known as the “Prophet of Spindletop” a decade after founding his Gladys City Oil, Gas & Manufacturing Company in 1892. He was instrumental in discovering the world-famous Spindletop oilfield at Beaumont, Texas. (more…)
