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…)
In 1899, Mary Byron Alford, the “Only Woman in the World who Owns and Operates a Dynamite Factory,” prospered in the midst of America’s first billion-dollar oilfield. Mrs. Alford’s oilfield nitro factory cooked 3,000 pounds of nitroglycerin every day.
The 85,000-acre Bradford oilfield in north-central McKean County, Pennsylvania, and south-central Cattaraugus County, New York, remains an important part of U.S. petroleum heritage. There are many reasons, including Mary Alford’s pioneering oilfield career at the turn of the century.
Penn-Brad Oil Museum Director Sherri Schulze in 2005 exhibited a laminated (though wrinkled) newspaper article from 1899. “This was done by a student many years ago,” she said. “It was a school project done by one of Mrs. Alford’s descendants.”
The July 1918 Burkburnett oilfield discovery on a small farm along the Red River in Texas launched a drilling boom that brought great prosperity to North Texas. It was just the beginning. Less than one year later, a well on another farm added 27 square miles to the oilfield, bringing even more exploration and production companies to Wichita County.
During the cold winter of 1888, 37-year-old oil scout Justus C. McMullen succumbed to pneumonia contracted while investigating oil production from a well in the wooded hills near Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.
McMullen, publisher of the Bradford “Petroleum Age” newspaper, already had contributed much to America’s early petroleum industry as a journalist and oilfield detective.
As giant oilfield discoveries created Texas millionaires after World War II, people started calling “Diamond Glenn” McCarthy the reigning King of the Wildcatters. Some historians have said a $21 million hotel McCarthy opened in 1949 put Houston on the map.
Glenn H. McCarthy’s petroleum career began with a 1935 well 50 miles east of Houston when he and partner R.A. Mason completed their No. 1 White well with production of almost 600 barrels of oil a day. The well extended by three miles to the north the already productive Anahuac field — which McCarthy had earlier discovered.
After discovering 11 Texas oil fields, Glenn McCarthy appeared on the February 13, 1950, cover of TIME.
By 1945, McCarthy had gone on to discover 11 new oilfields and extend others. In Brazoria County one year later, he drilled the highest-pressure gas well drilled to that time. Described as a “bombastic, plucky Irishman best known for building the famous Shamrock Hotel,” the Texas independent oilman would be featured on the February 13, 1950, cover of TIME. (more…)
Many oil and natural gas discoveries followed the Indian Territory’s first oil well drilled at Bartlesville in 1897, and especially after statehood came a decade later. None of Oklahoma’s 1920s oilfields compares to the economic impact of the Greater Seminole Area oil boom.
Although oil from the 1897 discovery in Indian Territory could not get to refineries for two years (lacking transportation infrastructure), the first Oklahoma oil well brought a surge in exploratory drilling.
More oilfield discoveries followed, including the Red Fork Gusher of 1901, which helped in Making Tulsa “Oil Capital of the World,” but Seminole area oilfields eclipsed them all. (more…)
