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.

First used to promote abundant natural gas supplies, Indiana lawmakers banned flambeaux displays in 1891, among the first states to legislate conservation. Photo of Findlay during its 1888 Gas Jubilee courtesy Hancock Historical Museum.

Discoveries of natural gas near the Indiana towns of Eaton and Portland quickly ignited a drilling boom. Petroleum exploration and production would change the state’s economy and provide a new energy source for manufacturers. 

Distilled Coal Gas

By 1859, the same year that Edwin L. Drake drilled the first U.S. oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, almost 300 “coal gas” companies operated in the 33 United States.

Coal gas was produced in a distillation process that extracted it from wood or coal. After further purification, the gas was distributed via low-pressure street mains to consumers. America’s first public street lamp used this manufactured gas to illuminate Market Street in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1817. This coal gas would illuminate the homes of almost five million customers.

Although natural gas was known to burn cleaner, hotter, and more efficiently than coal gas, pre-Civil War technology made handling it too dangerous for commercial applications. When drilling for oil, natural gas was often found — a colorless, odorless, highly flammable, and unwelcome hazard.

Drillers sought oil to send to refiners for distilling into kerosene, a safe and affordable lamp fuel. Demand for kerosene brought wooden derricks to the Allegheny River Valley (see Derricks of Triumph Hill), and the coal gas business continued to prosper, but natural gas remained an impediment.

Although wasteful, natural gas demonstrations attracted crowds — and manufacturers like Kokomo Opalescent Glass Works, which continues to operate today. Photo from Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, January 18, 1889.

After the Civil War, the great industrial cities of the North continued to expand, and new manufacturing centers developed where natural resources and transportation met. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo built coal-fired foundries and factories where iron, steel, and glass were produced in huge quantities for an expanding nation.

Natural Gas Discoveries

Throughout the Midwest, railroads brought new industries into what were once almost exclusively agrarian economies. Coal and increasingly oil were in great demand as natural gas began entering the energy mix.

Indiana’s first official natural gas well is credited to G. Bates, who found gas while drilling for oil at a depth of 500 feet in 1867. Two decades later, nearby gas wells piped gas into Francesville, Pulaski County, for about four years. With manufacturers dependent on coal-fired boilers, the search for coveted coal seams continued.

In 1885, Andrew Carnegie said that the natural gas he used for steelmaking had replaced 10,000 tons of coal a day.

In 1876, W.W. Worthington, superintendent of the Ft. Wayne & Southern Railroad, and partner George W. Carter, an experienced quarry owner, explored for coal by boring a two-inch-wide test core 50 feet from railroad tracks in Eaton, Indiana. At a depth of 606 feet, they ran into “an ill-smelling gas” that readily ignited into a two-foot-high flame.

Worthington and Carter had drilled into a natural gas deposit suffused with malodorous sulfur. Disappointed with not finding coal, they capped their pipe and moved on. Carter would return to the site about 10 years later.

Meanwhile, natural gas as an energy source began clearing skies in Pennsylvania. The state’s numerous iron and steel blast furnaces offered the first large-scale industrial use of natural gas, especially in “Smoky City,” Pittsburgh. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie proclaimed in 1885 that the natural gas he used for making steel had replaced 10,000 tons of coal a day.

Illuminated Boom Towns

The use of natural gas in steel mills also revealed that it could provide a competitive advantage to manufacturers with the good fortune to be located near a source (see Natural Gas is King in Pittsburgh). Energy-dependent industries looked for promising locations. Discoveries of gas fields brought attention, and producing towns and cities vigorously competed to attract new businesses. 

An 1886 natural gas well’s pressure could not be controlled by technology of the day; it became a tourist attraction. Image courtesy Hancock Historical Museum.

Like Indiana, Ohio greatly benefited from natural gas discoveries — as indicated by this 1937 marker “erected in humble pride by the people of Findlay, Ohio.” Photo courtesy Hancock Historical Museum.

Near Findlay, Ohio, the spectacular “Great Karg Well” erupted natural gas on January 20, 1886, with an initial flow of 12 million cubic feet per day. With the limited technology of the day, the well’s pressure could not be brought under control and ignited. The Ohio natural gas field’s discovery well produced a towering plume of fire that burned for four months (learn more about controlling wells in Ending Oil Gushers – BOP).

Many companies promoted Ohio’s natural gas supplies, which attracted glass companies from around the world, until the gas ran out. Image courtesy Historical Marker Database.

In Portland, Indiana — about 100 miles southwest of the headline-making gas field at Findlay — foundry owner Henry Sees followed the dramatic news. He became convinced there was natural gas to be found in Portland as well. His enthusiasm eventually persuaded local investors.

Eureka Gas & Oil Company

Established in 1886, the Eureka Gas & Oil Company began to explore near Portland. On March 28, after drilling to a depth of 700 feet, its well found natural gas. The Portland Sun newspaper announced “NATURAL GAS!” in Indiana, reporting, “A strong blaze shot up from six to eight feet and was allowed to burn for some time for the edification of the multitude who jostled about, fell over each other and crowded the derrick house.”

Eureka Gas & Oil raised additional funds to drill another well a half-mile away. Drilling continued until a sudden and continuous rush of natural gas scrambled the crew to extinguish any nearby source of ignition. When the second well’s gas was piped out from the derrick and safely lighted, it flamed 15 feet into the air. The well’s output was estimated to be 100,000 cubic feet per day.

Investors quickly formed another venture, Portland Natural Gas & Oil Company, to continue drilling natural gas wells — and to pursue delivery to the town.

By April 1887, five miles of main pipe were supplying natural gas to offices, residences, and 50 large torches, or “flambeaux,” for street lighting. That same month, local businessmen organized the Manufacturers’ Gas & Oil Company for the specific purpose of providing free gas to manufacturers as an incentive to locate their factories in Portland.

Trenton Field

George W. Carter of Eaton, Indiana, was among the thousands who traveled to Ohio in 1886 to see the Great Karg Well. Carter was the quarry owner who had searched for coal unsuccessfully in Eaton 10 years earlier. At the Ohio well, Carter recognized a disagreeable but familiar odor and declared, “That stuff smells like our coal mine!” Carter returned to Eaton, determined to drill at the railroad site he and W.W. Worthington had once deemed worthless.

With the Ohio gas discoveries exciting speculation, Carter and Worthington convinced Ft. Wayne and Eaton investors of the long-abandoned borehole’s potential. They established Eaton Mining & Gas Company in February 1886. After drilling beyond the earlier 606-foot depth, they hit a strong flow of natural gas at 922 feet on the night of September 15, 1886.

With a two-inch pipe extended 18 feet above the derrick, the gas produced a flame reportedly visible in Muncie, 10 miles away. It heralded what proved to be the 5,120-square-mile Trenton natural gas field.

The discoveries of natural gas in Eaton and Portland ignited an Indiana exploration and production boom that changed the state’s economy. As the scramble began, the Indianapolis News reported, “It’s a poor town that can’t muster enough money for a gas well…”

The Pulaski County Historical Society in 1988 erected a marker commemorating the 1867 gas discovery at a depth of 300 feet.

The Trenton field, as it would become known, spread over 17 east-central Indiana counties. It was the largest natural gas field known in the world. Within three years, over 200 companies in Indiana were exploring, drilling, distributing, and selling natural gas from more than 380 producing wells.

Gas was so plentiful that customers were charged by the month or year rather than for a metered amount of gas.

The rapid growth and industrialization that Findlay, Portland, and Eaton experienced was repeated again and again in Indiana’s “Gas Belt.” Cities like Muncie, Kokomo, Anderson, and Marion competed to attract new industries with offers of free natural gas, land, railway sidings, and tax credits.

On October 6, 1886, in Kokomo, a 900-foot-deep natural gas well in a cornfield created the Indiana Natural Gas Company and led to the establishment of the Opalescent Glass Works two years later. In continuous operation ever since, Kokomo Opalescent Glass began selling thousands of pounds of stained glass to Tiffany Glass Company and electric insulators to Edison General Electric. 

By 1890, lured by generous incentives, 162 “Gas Belt” factories were built, creating over 10,000 jobs. Among the new industries were tinplate mills in Anderson, Gas City, and Elwood, as well as 21 new glass factories. Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing relocated to Muncie from Buffalo, N.Y. 

As the gas boom continued, communities took great pride in what they thought to be their unlimited supply of natural gas. Estimated production in 1890 was almost 40 billion cubic feet. It became fashionable to erect arches of perforated iron pipe and let them burn brightly day and night for month after month.

Industries looked for promising locations in Indiana and Ohio as towns competed to attract them. Photo of downtown Findlay during Gas Jubilee of 1888 courtesy Hancock Historical Museum.

There were calls for conservation, but they went largely unheeded.

Boom to Bust

In 1893 the State Inspector of Natural Gas wrote, “The waste has been criminal and the day of repentance is fast approaching and can only be delayed by practicing the most rigid economy and unrelaxed efforts in the husbandry of this valuable resource of our State.” Signs of the approaching crisis became increasingly evident — dropping pressure at wellheads.

By 1902, low pressure in the majority of the state’s gas wells was resulting in saltwater intrusion. Increasing numbers of wells stopped producing natural gas. Many of the manufacturers who had come to Indiana for the ready supply of cheap energy either went out of business or had to move when their natural gas sources failed.

Glass manufacturing companies were particularly hard hit.

In 1907, Indiana Glass Company consolidated several failing glass companies in Dunkirk — and imported Kentucky and West Virginia coal to create its own gas.

Thousands of jobs were lost to plant closings in other manufacturing industries. National Tin Plate, Ames Shovel, Indiana Box, American Wire & Nail, Viehl Carriage, and Anderson Bottling all succumbed to the depletion of natural gas. Indiana’s gas boom ended almost as quickly as it had begun. By 1913, Indiana was importing natural gas from West Virginia to meet demand. 

The gas boom was over, and Indiana became a consumer rather than a producer of natural gas in the 1920s. The consumption and waste so characteristic of Indiana’s gas boom provided other states an important lesson: the necessity to manage the use of natural resources.

Positive Legacy

The economic boom’s positive impact remains in many Indiana communities, according to Discover Indiana, which notes the city of Kokomo more than doubled in population.

“The history of Indiana’s gas boom is one of entrepreneurs, inventions, and squandered natural wealth,” explains a Discover Indiana article. “It is the story of the turning point that made Howard County, Kokomo, and many other communities in east-central Indiana what they are today.”

The state’s public history project offers other insights and links to resources, including the Howard County Historical Society in Kokomo and the Hays Museum, once the mansion of Elmer Hays, designer of “a device to remove moisture from natural gas, which had been clogging the new pipelines with ice.”

In Ohio, the Hancock Historical Museum in Findlay preserves natural gas history — and is less than two miles from the site of the famous Karg well, which a historic marker on June 21, 1937, “erected in humble pride by the people of Findlay, Ohio.” 

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Recommended Reading: The Extraction State, A History of Natural Gas in America (2021); Natural Gas: Fuel for the 21st Century (2015); Natural Gas for the Hoosier State (1995). 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 support this energy education website, subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, and help expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. 

Citation Information: Article Title – “Indiana Natural Gas Boom.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/indiana-natural-gas-boom. Last Updated: March 22, 2026. Original Published Date: February 1, 2010.

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As the worst of the Great Depression approached, an 11-day geyser of Oklahoma “black gold” was irresistible to newspaper editors and newsreel producers in 1930. Crews from NBC Radio rushed to cover the dramatic struggle to control “Wild Mary Sudik,” a blowout in the Oklahoma City oilfield. Repeated attempts to contain the well made headlines.

The Mary Sudik No. 1 well erupted after striking a high-pressure formation about 6,500 feet beneath the farm of Vincent and Mary Sudik near the intersection of Bryant Street and present-day I-240 in southwest Oklahoma City. The Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Company’s well flowed a “volcano of crude oil and natural gas” for 11 days before being brought under control.

“Wild Mary Sudik” erupted on March 26, 1930, and the battle to contain the well was regularly featured in newspapers, theater newsreels, and on NBC Radio. Photo courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society.

Every day, the highly pressurized well produced an astounding 20,000 barrels of oil and 200 million cubic feet of natural gas — far too much for the production technologies.

Attempts to control the “Wild Mary” became a public sensation with updates in newspapers, newsreel clips, and radio broadcasts, according to Oklahoma Journeys, a 2005 audio program at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City.

“At about 6:30 the morning of March 26, 1930, the crew of roughnecks drilling a well on the property of Vincent Sudik paused in their work,” the program begins about the famous well drilled on the Sudik farm. “The tired drillers had been waiting for daylight to continue their work.” 

The Mary Sudik No. 1 well, “defiled all efforts to shut off her volcano of crude oil and natural gas,” declared the Daily Oklahoman. Crews hastily constructed pits to recover 200,000 barrels of oil.

The crew was unfamiliar with the formation’s hazards, explains narrator Michael Dean, who says that after drilling to 6,471 feet, they overlooked signs of a dangerous pressure increase in the well. “The exhausted crew failed to fill the hole with mud.” 

“They didn’t know the Wilcox Sand formation was permeated with natural gas under high pressure, and within minutes that sand under so much pressure found a release,” the narrator adds.

A circa 1940s map of the Oklahoma City oilfield shows the site of Mary Sudik No. 1 well in the Wilcox sands formation.

The drilling crew was caught off guard when oil and natural gas suddenly “came roaring out of the hole,” Dean explains. “Pipe stems were thrown hundreds of feet into the air like so many toothpicks. First, there was gas then the flow turned green gold and then black. Oil shot hundreds of feet into the air, and for the next eleven days, the Mary Sudik ran wild.”

Years earlier, as mid-continent oil and natural gas wells reached deeper depths by the early 1900s, highly pressurized formations in Kansas and the Indian Territory had challenged the petroleum industry’s well-control technologies.

In 1906, when lightning hit a natural gas well at Caney, Kansas, an uncontrollable flame could be seen for 35 miles (learn more in Kansas Gas Well Fire).

“Wild Mary Sudik” Daily Updates

Floyd Gibbons of NBC Radio — who regularly broadcasted about the Oklahoma City well — on April 6, 1930, reported that after two unsuccessful attempts, the roaring well was finally closed with a two-ton “overshot” cap.

Experts control the well with “a clever ball-shaped contrivance” that lowers a two-ton “overshot” cap.

An Associated Press article described the “clever equipment” required to control the well without sparking a fire — a “double die was screwed into four inches of casing threads…a clever ball-shaped contrivance, called a fantail, was used to affix the double die to the casing.”

The fantail was placed over the well, “and the ‘Wild Mary’s’ pressure, playing through jets in the contrivance, aided in lowering the cap through the blast,” the article explained.

“With the petroleum geyser halted, operators in the field drew sighs of relief,” it concluded. “A stray spark from two clanking pieces of steel and the territory might have become a raging inferno.”

With the well brought under control and the danger of fire eliminated, drilling continued at a frantic pace elsewhere in Oklahoma City (see Oklahoma’s King of the Wildcatters). The extremely high pressure of Wilcox sand formations continued to challenge drillers and exploration companies.

The Southwest Missourian newspaper reported, “Oklahoma City, April 7, 1930 — A gas well, estimated to be producing at a rate of 75,000,000 cubic feet a day, blew in at the edge of the city today, creating a new fire threat less than 24 hours after the wild No. 1 Mary Sudik gusher, several miles to the south, had been brought under control.”

Recognizing the risks of drilling into the Wilcox sand, Oklahoma City passed additional ordinances for safety and well spacing in the city.

Blowout Preventer

James Abercrombie, a Texan who had personal experience with uncontrollable blowouts, had an idea for a “ram-type” blowout preventer using hydrostatic pistons to close on the drill stem and seal against the well pressure. In 1920, he met a skilled machinist, Harry Cameron. They would make oilfields much safer.

Cameron manufactured the earliest ram-type blowout preventer (POB) patented by Abercrombie in 1926. High-pressure wells would still need better technologies to tame; preventing them from erupting was ideal. By 1933, Abercrombie patented an improved BOP — setting a new standard for safe drilling in the Oklahoma City oilfield.

The Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City includes the Devon Energy Oil and Gas Park. Photo by Bruce Wells.

In Oklahoma City, visitors can view the Mary Sudik well’s technology — the actual valve that split in half — and watch a newsreel — all in the natural resources exhibit at the Oklahoma History Center. Adjacent to the center on 23rd Street east of the state capitol building, the Devon Energy Oil and Gas Park includes displays of petroleum drilling and production equipment.

Learn about the evolution of oilfield safety advancements in Oilfield Firefighting Technologies.

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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please support this energy education website, subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, and help expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. 

Citation Information – Article Title: “World-Famous Wild Mary Sudik.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/world-famous-wild-mary-sudik. Last Updated: March 19, 2026. Original Published Date: March 24, 2013.

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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 of the already productive Anahuac field — which McCarthy had earlier discovered.

After discovering 11 oil and natural gas fields in Texas, Glenn McCarthy appeared on the February 13, 1950, cover of TIME.

By 1945, McCarthy had gone on to discover 11 new fields 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.

Born in Beaumont, Texas, on December 25, 1907, Glenn H. McCarthy worked as an eight-year-old water boy in the Beaumont oilfields, where his father Will McCarthy worked for a wage of 50 cents a day, according to HoustonHistory.com.

The family moved to Houston in 1917, and McCarthy excelled in football at San Jacinto High School. He eventually won a scholarship to Tulane University and later transferred to Texas A&M. Although recruited to play fullback at Houston’s Rice Institute, McCarthy dropped out of college and entered the oil business. He soon owned two Houston gas stations.

While pumping gas one day in 1930, McCarthy met his future when she pulled into his station driving a Cadillac convertible. When he later eloped with Faustine Lee, daughter of a successful oilman, McCarthy decided to get into the same business — without any help from his father-in-law, Thomas P. Lee.

“At the time of his marriage and his quitting college, he claimed that he had less than $1.50 in his pocket, according to a 2020 article at Texas Handbook Online. After drilling wells for others, McCarthy, 24, explored for himself in Hardin County, Texas, but failed to find commercial quantities of oil.

More dry holes followed, but two years later McCarthy made his first major oilfield discovery at Anahuac, near Trinity Bay on the Gulf Coast.

Hollywood Friends

By the late 1940s, McCarthy had more than 400 producing oil and natural gas wells in Texas and was president of the United States Petroleum Association. As his reputation as a hard-charging, hard-drinking wildcatter grew, his estimated worth reached $200 million (almost $2.5 billion in 2023 dollars).

Glenn McCarthy produced the movie “The Green Promise” in 1949, the first independent production of RKO Pictures after Howard Hughes Jr. took contr5ol of the studio a year earlier.

Increasingly known as “Diamond Glenn” McCarthy, in 1949 he produced the RKO movie “The Green Promise,” starring a young Natalie Wood and fellow Irishman Walter Brennan. McCarthy’s many Hollywood friends included Errol Flynn, Pat O’Brien, John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Dorothy Lamour, Howard Hughes Jr., and Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern Airlines.

According to his 1951 authorized biography, Corduroy Road: The Story of Glenn H. McCarthy, he reportedly was the inspiration for the character Jett Rink in Edna Ferber’s 1952 novel Giant, portrayed by James Dean in the 1956 film adaptation.

“Diamond Glenn” McCarthy arranged for a sixteen-car Santa Fe Super Chief train to bring the stars he had met in Hollywood to his 1949 opening of the 18-story, 1,100-room Shamrock Hotel.

In addition to his McCarthy Oil and Gas Company, McCarthy would eventually own the Beaumont Gas Company, the Houston Export Company, KXYZ Radio, the McCarthy Chemical Company, the McCarthy International Tube Company, fourteen newspapers, a magazine, a movie-production company, two banks, and the Shell Building in downtown Houston.

“Glittering Shamrock”

Constructed between 1946 and 1949, the 18-story, 1,100-room Shamrock Hotel was the largest in the United States. McCarthy spent $21 million to build it. He reportedly spent another $1 million on its opening day gala on St. Patrick’s Day.

The Shamrock’s opening made Houston a star overnight, one newspaper reported the next day, March 18, 1949. The opening gala — where McCarthy also introduced his own label of “Wildcatter” bourbon — was dubbed Houston’s biggest party.

The Shamrock’s swimming pool was 165 feet by 142 feet, big enough for water ski demonstrations. Photo courtesy celticowboy.com

“The hotel had a shamrock motif, 63 shades of green colors in the interiors, the reception desk pen wrote in green ink, the Steinway piano in the lobby was green, out front, above the entrance, Irish flags flapped in the breeze. The Shamrock was something to see,” noted one observer.

Although built far from the downtown business district, something unheard of at the time, more than 5,000 attended (invited and uninvited) the hotel’s opening. McCarthy arranged for a Santa Fe Super Chief 16-car train to bring his Hollywood friends to help him celebrate.

A headline in the Houston Press proclaimed, “Glittering Shamrock Debut Transformed into Champagne-Popping ‘Subway’ Rush.” Events of the evening before at the new Shamrock Hotel were indeed unlike anything Houstonians had witnessed before, explains a 2011 article in the Houston Business Journal.

“Diamond Glenn” McCarthy, pictured in December 1986, had hoped his hotel would last 100 years. Photo courtesy Glenn Lewis, Houston Chronicle.

“The hotel had a swimming pool large enough to accommodate water-skiing demonstrations, a lobby the size of a football field with Brazilian mahogany paneling carved from one gigantic tree, and a television set in every room, noted reporter Betty T. Chapman. Houston had one TV station at the time with limited programming.

Las Vegas Headliners

The Shamrock’s Emerald Room would soon rival Las Vegas with headliners like Frank Sinatra, Burns and Allen, and Sophie Tucker. On opening night, actress Dorothy Lamour agreed to broadcast the festivities.

Although some Houstonians rallied to preserve the Shamrock Hotel (including an elderly Glenn McCarthy), it took the wrecking ball crew just two weeks to demolish the famed hotel in 1987. Photo courtesy the Sloan Gallery.

“Part of the entertainment was a live broadcast of Dorothy Lamour’s national radio show from the Emerald Room,” Chapman reports. “Lamour was shut off the air after 10 minutes because of colorful language used by a network engineer in Chicago, referring to the poor transmission from Houston’s station.”

Although the show resumed, Chapman says, “The incident gave the Shamrock opening some notoriety that would become part of its ongoing legend.” 

From 1949 to 1953, a national radio show, “Saturday at the Shamrock,” was broadcast from the Emerald Room — the only regularly scheduled national radio show to broadcast from Texas.

McCarthy once said he built his hotel to last 100 years, but the Shamrock was demolished in 1987 by the Houston Medical Center, which had bought it from the Hilton Hotel chain. Despite his years of success, by 1952 he found himself overextended and in debt (see Glenn McCarthy, Inc.).

The Irish oilman introduced his own “Wildcatter” label whiskey at the Shamrock’s 1949 opening.

Although he would recover financially, in 1955 he sold the Shamrock to the Hilton Hotels Corporation, a company that got its start thanks to a Texas oilfield (see Oil Boom Brings First Hilton Hotel).

Hilton Hotels in 1954 took over management of the hotel before buying it one year later. The Houston Independent School District’s DeBakey High School for Health Professions opened in 2017 on the site of McCarthy’s once-famous hotel.

In his later years, Glenn McCarthy lived quietly in a modest two-story house near La Porte. He would live to see his hotel torn down and turned into a parking lot. McCarthy died on December 26, 1988, and was buried in Glenwood Cemetery next to his wife, Faustine.

The legend of the Shamrock and its grand opening has lived on, according to the Houston Business Journal, “because on one March night in 1949, the Shamrock introduced Houston as a dynamic city of the future to the rest of the nation.”

The journal cited an article in Vanity Fair, which proclaimed, “The stereotype of the raw, hard-living, bourbon-swilling, fist-fighting, cash-tossing, damn-the-torpedoes Texas oil millionaire did not exist before Glenn McCarthy rocketed into the national imagination in the late 1940s.”

Learn more in “The Man Who Was Texas,” in Vanity Fair, excerpted from the 2009 book The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes, by Bryan Burrough.

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Recommended Reading: The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes (2009); Corduroy Road: The story of Glenn H. McCarthy (1951); Wildcatters: Texas Independent Oilmen (1984). 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 support this energy education website, our monthly email newsletter, and help expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Diamond Glenn” McCarthy. Authors: B.A. and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/diamond-glenn-mccarthy. Last Updated: March 15, 2026. Original Published Date: July 19, 2015.

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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.

Prosperity brought traffic jams to Seminole, Oklahoma, in the mid-1920s when new oilfields “swung the United States’ oil inventory from scarcity to surplus.” Photo courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society.

Interest in exploring for oil in the struggling farming region accelerated on March 17, 1923, when a wildcat well, the Betsy Foster No. 1, produced 2,800 barrels of oil a day near Wewoka, the county seat of Seminole County.

The oilfield discovery well south of Oklahoma City led to others, including a widely publicized discovery on July 16, 1926. The Seminole region’s Fixico No. 1 well revealed the extensive, petroleum-rich Wilcox sands at a depth of 4,075 feet. 

Initially flowing at 6,120 barrels of oil a day, the Independent Oil Company well of R.F. Garland was one of five oil reservoirs discovered in the Seminole area by 1927.

Seminole Field leads World

Seminole area oilfields at their height would account for 2.6 percent of the world’s oil supply — and also cause oil prices to fall as low as 15 cents per barrel.

The name “Greater Seminole Field” was adopted in 1926, after “operators from the various fields met to discuss voluntary proration, well spacing, and production control,” according to the Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS).

By 1935, the new oilfields around Seminole became the largest supplier of oil in the world. More than 60 petroleum reservoirs were found in 1,300 square miles, and seven were “giants,” each producing millions of barrels of oil.

Seismic technology first helped find oil on December 4, 1928, when it revealed details of the Viola limestone formation near Seminole, resulting the world’s first oil discovery in a geological structure that had been identified by reflection (learn more in Exploring Seismic Waves).

The series of discoveries included strikes in the Hunton lime formation by Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Company in March 1926, followed by a July discovery of Wilcox sand production by Amerada Petroleum Company nearby. 

“Oil workers working on lowered traveling block” at a well in Seminole oilfield, August 1939. Farm Security Administration photo by Russell Lee (1903-1986) courtesy Library of Congress.

“In rapid succession came discoveries of the Searight, Earlsboro, Bowlegs and Little River reservoirs,” according to a 1977 granite monument near the entrance to Seminole Municipal Park. The discoveries brought 20,000 oilfield workers to Seminole County — and created several classic petroleum boom towns.

The prosperity of these discoveries transformed life in many central Oklahoma farming communities.

Closed in 2019, the Oklahoma Oil Museum in Seminole once included a volunteer-made diorama of small towns near seven of Oklahoma’s 20 “giant” oilfields. Photo by Kris Wells.

Prior to the oil boom period, the greater Seminole area was one of the poorest economic areas in Oklahoma. The Seminoles were the smallest in numbers and the lowest on the economic scale of the Five Civilized Tribes.

“By the 1920s, farmers in Seminole County, like those elsewhere, were beginning to feel the pinch of hard times created by falling prices for farm produce,” noted historian Louise Welsh in A History of the Greater Seminole Oil Field.

“An advertisement of the First National Bank in the Seminole County News urged people to have clear heads, stout hearts and busy hands, and to remember that greater problems had been met and solved,” Welsh added.

Oilfield roughnecks at work during Oklahoma’s Greater Seminole Area boom of the 1930s. Photo by Russell Lee for Farm Security Administration, courtesy Library of Congress.

“It was quite natural that, under such stress, the prospect of finding oil should occasion both excitement and hope, since the prospect of leasing his land might provide the necessary funds with which the hard-pressed farmer could pay off his mortgage,” Welsh reported.

Although the area’s first discovery came near Wewoka in 1923, and the Cromwell oilfield was developed in 1924, and leasing activity continued around Seminole, it was not until 1926 that the hope for a giant oilfield discovery was realized.

“It was the Independent Oil and Gas Company’s No. 1 Fixico, whose 6,120 barrels a day from the Wilcox created a real bonanza, that precipitated the Seminole boom,” Welsh explained. The Seminole County population increased from 23,808 in 1920 to 79,621 in 1930.

At its height, the Seminole City oilfield accounted for 2.6 percent of the world’s oil production, Welsh added, noting massive Oklahoma production glutted oil markets and resulted in a price collapse to as low as 15 cents per barrel. The oilfields were then placed under state control.

“Thus, the conservation movement, as far as the oil industry is concerned, started in Oklahoma and largely in the greater Seminole areas,” Welsh concluded. Dedicated volunteers operated the Oklahoma Oil Museum at 1800 Hwy. 9 West in Seminole.

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Recommended Reading:  A History of the Greater Seminole Oil Field (1981);  Oil And Gas In Oklahoma: Petroleum Geology In Oklahoma (2013); Oil in Oklahoma (1976). 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 support this energy education website, subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, and help expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. 

Citation Information – Article Title: “Seminole Oil Boom.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/seminole-oil-boom. Last Updated: March 11, 2026. Original Published Date: April 29, 2014.

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An 1829 well drilled with a spring-pole seeking brine found petroleum instead. Production from the “Kentucky’s Great American Oil Well” would be bottled and sold for medicinal purposes. Also known as the “Old American Well,” the fortuitous discovery was among the earliest commercial oil wells in the United States.

Although drilling specifically for oil would not begin until three decades later in Titusville, Pennsylvania (see First American Oil Well), the Kentucky well struck a highly pressurized geologic formation, making the failed brine well one of the nation’s first oil gushers.

An 1865 Kentucky State Geology Survey map, “embracing about 16 miles square of Cumberland County,” includes the March 11, 1829, Great American Oil Well — drilled for brine but producing oil bottled and sold for “medicinal” purposes.

Boring for salt brine with a simple spring-pole device on a farm near Burkesville, Kentucky, drillers found oil instead. They had been working for a local doctor when, on March 11, 1829, a geyser of oil erupted “to the top of the surrounding trees.”

The Cumberland County well was drilled “using an apparatus consisting of a spring pole made from a strong sapling, set in the crotch of a tree.” The driller manipulated a heavy bit fastened to the free end of the pole by using his foot. It was a slow task requiring frequent stops; as wells got deeper, steam-powered cable tools came into use (see Making Hole – Drilling Technology).

Pride of Burkesville

An advocate of the Kentucky well’s heritage, the nearby Burkesville Riverfront Lodge Motel has noted in its promotions, “The Old Oil Well led the parade in 1829, and so it will continue to mark the spot where the world’s greatest industry was born.”

Other Kentuckians have agreed with the Burkesville motel’s claim the discovery was the first commercially operated U.S. oil well, predating the famous well in Titusville, Pennsylvania (drilled for oil to make kerosene) by 30 years. The Kentucky Legislature in 1934 erected a historic marker — a large millstone topped by a bronze tablet — with this inscription:

The history and subsequent events of the First Great American Gusher have been kept alive through a few interested citizens who have never, for any length of time, let go of this birth of what has come to be a necessary part of the world today.

The 50,000 barrel, Old Oil Well, led the parade in 1829 and so it will continue to mark the spot where the world’s greatest industry was born.

Preceding oil wildcatters, settlers seeking brine drilled with the “spring-pole,” a technology used by the Chinese as early as 450 A.D. Photo from “The World Struggle for Oil,” a 1924 film by the Department of the Interior.

Technologies for petroleum drilling, production, and well control (see Ending Oil Gushers — BOP) had yet to be invented. “The salt borers were greatly disappointed,” reported an 1847 account of the discovery. “The well was neglected for several years, until it was discovered that the oil possessed valuable medicinal qualities.”

Oil for Medicinal Purposes

Petroleum’s uses in medicine, which has continued, began as a cure-all bottled in large quantities and “extensively sold in nearly all the states in the Union.”

The 1810-1960 Burkesville Sesquicentennial booklet cites an August 22, 1919, article from the Burkesville Leader newspaper: The well was a continuing puzzle to the curious travelers who succeeded in winding tortuous journey over bed of the creek…There was a reputation as a cure all which spread around among the various adventurers through the years. The fluid was bottled and sold under the caption of “American Rock Oil.”

The writer knew personally, in later years, one man who vouched for its curative powers for baldness. He stated that when he left the oil field on Saturday night he always took his double handful of crude oil and thoroughly douzed his head in it, massaging it into his scalp. When he died at the age of 91 he had a beautiful shock of white hair!

Kentucky today has produced oil and natural gas in 52 counties. Oil production (green) is in the western and south-central areas. Most natural gas (red) is in eastern counties. Cumberland County is on the Tennessee border in the middle of the state.

Some claim Kentucky oil ended up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1840s, where Samuel Kier sold it as medicine. In the mid-1850s Kier refined Pennsylvania oil into a kerosene lamp fuel, which many continued to call “coal oil.”

The historic Kentucky oil well produced until about the Civil War. Salt makers eventually took over the operation of the well, as salt water replaced oil as the well’s primary output.

Ohio Oil Wells

Records gathered as part of a centennial celebration in 1929 “documenting the first commercially operated oil well in the United States” are preserved at the University of Kentucky Special Collections.

However, another even earlier Kentucky well reportedly drilled for brine and found oil. In 1818, Marcus Huling and Andrew Zimmerman drilled for it on Martin Beaty’s land in what is now the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in McCreary County and also found oil that was bottled and sold for medicinal purposes.

However, the McCreary County well produced “very little of the useless stuff” and was quickly abandoned and forgotten.

Cumberland County medicine bottle embossed with the words American Oil and Kentucky.

Still earlier, in Noble County, Ohio, drillers seeking brine near Caldwell in 1814 discovered oil — which they soaked up with rags, bottled, and sold. The Caldwell Chamber of Commerce and the Ohio Natural Energy Institute (ONEI) have proclaimed, “First U.S. discovery of crude oil from a drilled well was in 1814, Noble County, Ohio.” ONEI added that Ohio’s first commercial oil production began in 1860, followed by natural gas in 1884.

By the early 21st century, more than 275,000 wells had been drilled in Ohio — among the most of all U.S. producing states. Ohio historians also have staked a claim for the petroleum industry’s earliest offshore wells (see Ohio Offshore Wells).

Kentucky petroleum has come from 52 out of its 102 counties — often from rock formations dating from the Cambrian to Pennsylvanian ages, mostly from the state’s western and south-central regions. Significant natural gas fields also have been found in eastern counties. Almost 1,000 wells were drilled in 2009, including 304 dry holes.

On the courthouse grounds in Whitley, a 1979 Kentucky Historical Society marker commemorates the McCreary County oil gusher, drilled about 100 miles west of the marker 150 years earlier.

In August 1859. a former railroad conductor was hired by Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company founder George Bissell to drill for — not brine — near Titusville. Edwin L. Drake launched the U.S. petroleum industry on August 27 after finding oil at a depth of 69.5 feet. 

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Recommended Reading: Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum (1975); The Birth of the Oil Industry (1938); A Geophysicist’s Memoir: Searching for Oil on Six Continents (2017). 

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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please support this energy education website, subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, and help expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. 

Citation Information – Article Title: “Kentucky’s Great American Oil Well.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/kentuckys-great-american-well. Last Updated: March 8, 2026. Original Published Date: March 10, 2014.

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Once known as “Dry Hole Slick,” wildcatter Thomas B. Slick discovered Oklahoma’s giant Cushing oilfield in 1912 and became known as the “King of the Wildcatters.” Cushing would become the “Pipeline Crossroads of the World,” a key trading hub for petroleum in North America — and the daily settlement point for oil prices, including West Texas Intermediate (WTI).

The owner of Spurlock Petroleum Company, Alexander Massey, enjoyed great success in the Kansas oilfields after finding oil or natural gas in 25 consecutive wells. In 1904, Massey hired an inexperienced 21-year-old “lease man” named Thomas Baker Slick for a 25 percent share in all the leases the young man could secure. They went to Tryon, Oklahoma, to look for oil.

When wildcatter Thomas B. Slick, 49, died from a stroke in 1930, Oklahoma City oilfield derricks stood silent for one hour in tribute. 1939 capitol building photo by Russell Lee, courtesy Library of Congress.

Massey later recalled that Slick, born in Shippenville, Pennsylvania, in 1883, showed a talent for securing petroleum leases. “Tom would go out and lease most of a territory as yet unproved or doubtful as to oil prospects,” Massey noted. “But he’d spread as clean a bunch of leases before a capitalist as you’d wish to see…He certainly knew what a good oil lease was.”

Spurlock Petroleum Company spudded an exploratory well on the farm of M.C. Teegarden near Tryon. As Slick continued securing leases that eventually totaled more than 27,000 acres, drilling generated excitement in the local newspaper and with other Oklahoma wildcatters. 

Once known as “Dry Hole Slick,” Tom Slick discovered the giant Cushing oilfield on March 12, 1912.

However, at a depth of 2,800 feet with no signs of oil, Spurlock Petroleum and owner Massey ran out of money. Tom Slick’s first well was a dry hole. It was the first of many.

Dry Hole Slick

In 1907, after another dry hole near Kendrick, Oklahoma, Slick left the employ of Massey and headed for Chicago, Illinois. Charles B. Shaffer of the Shaffer & Smathers Company hired Slick for $100 per month (and expenses) to find and secure promising oil leases.

Slick traveled to Illinois, Kentucky, western Canada and eventually, back to Oklahoma. While leasing for Shaffer & Smathers, the young oilman drilled at least ten dry holes in Oklahoma, earning his unenviable nickname, “Dry Hole Slick.”

An example of township leases similar to those negotiated by Tom Slick is from the “Atlas of North Central Oklahoma, 1917 Oil Fields and Landowners: Oklahoma, M.P. Burke.”

The Bristow Record newspaper reported that Slick “continues to gamble on wild cat stuff. Few men have stuck to the wildcatting longer and harder than Slick and associates. It is said he has spent $150,000 mostly on dry holes.”

Soon known as “Mad Tom” Slick, the wildcatter tried his luck again 35 miles down the road in Cushing, pursuing leases there in 1912.

Meanwhile, local publications like the Cushing Independent encouraged readers to take advantage of leasing opportunities. “Land owners have everything to gain and no risk to themselves in making leases,” the newspaper reported on January 25.

“It costs from $8,000 to $10,000 to put down a single hole,” the newspaper noted. “Unless the promoters can get the leases they want, they will not chance their money here, while other localities are eager to give leases and even bonuses in money to get prospecting done.”

The Cushing Democrat added, “We would repeat that we believe it to be in the best interests of the individuals and all that these leases be granted…And just a word of warning. If you make a lease see that the lessee’s name is not left blank, but that the name of Thomas B. Slick is there.”

Slick and Charles Shaffer spudded a wildcat well on the farm of Frank M. Wheeler in January 1912.

Gusher at Cushing

On March 12, 1912, the Wheeler No. 1 well struck oil, producing about 400 barrels a day from a depth between 2,319 and 2,347 feet. It marked Tom Slick’s first gusher — and a giant oilfield discovery. Slick was so secretive about his find that he even cut the phone line to the Wheeler house to prevent word from spreading.

Knowing that exploration companies and speculators would descend in droves on the town once word got out, Slick protected his investment. Just how he did so would be described by a frustrated competing lease man to his boss:

You see, sir, Slick and Shaffer roped off their well on the Wheeler farm and posted guards and nobody can get near it…I got a call yesterday at the hotel in Cushing from a friend who said they had struck oil out there. A friend of his was listening in on the party line and heard the driller call Tom Slick at the farm where he’s been boarding and said they’d hit.

Pump stations in the Cushing oilfield, 1910-1918, from the Oklahoma Historical Society. More than 50 refineries once operated in the Cushing area about 50 miles west of Tulsa. Pipelines and storage facilities have since made it “the pipeline crossroads of the world.”

Well, I rushed down to the livery stable to get a rig to go out and do some leasing and damned if Slick hadn’t already been there and hired every rig. Not only there, but every other stable in town. They all had the barns locked and the horses out to pasture. There’s 25 rigs for hire in Cushing and he had them all for ten days at $4.50 a day apiece, so you know he really thinks he’s got something.

I went looking for a farm wagon to hire and had to walk three miles. Some other scouts had already gotten the wagons on the first farms I hit. Soon as I got one I beat it back to town to pick up a notary public to carry along with me to get leases — and damned if Slick hadn’t hired every notary in town, too.

Eleven days later the news had spread. As a leasing frenzy grew, the Tryon Star reported, “Our old friend Tom Slick the oilman has struck it rich…Slick has been plugging away for several years and has put down several dry holes…He deserves this success and here’s hoping that it will make Tom his millions.”

New King of the Wildcatters

Tom Slick’s No. 1 Wheeler was the discovery well for the prolific Drumright-Cushing oilfield, which produced for the next 35 years, reaching 330,000 barrels every day at its peak.

Oklahoma’s Drumright Historical Society Museum includes the town’s 1915 Santa Fe Railroad Depot, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Slick was suddenly a very rich man. After his dramatic success in Drumright and Cushing, he began an incredible 18-year streak of discoveries in some of the nation’s most prolific oilfields. Visit the Drumright Historical Society Museum.

Slick was active in the Seminole Area, especially the oilfields of Pioneer, Tonkawa, Papoose, and Seminole. He secured leases and drilled wells that consistently paid off.

By the end of 1930, Tom Slick was drilling or had completed more than 75 wells with the capacity to produce 200,000 barrels of oil per day.

Slick’s oil gushers were spectacular: No. 4 Eakin — 10,000 barrels per day; No. 1 Laura Endicott — 4,500 barrels per day; No. 1 Walker — 5,000 barrels per day; No. 1 Franks — 5,000 barrels per day (see Greater Seminole Oil Boom).

Reflecting on his fortunes late in his career, he noted, “If I strike oil everyone calls it Tom Slick’s luck, (but) I call it largely judgment based upon experience. Some folks don’t recognize good luck when they meet it in the middle of the road. So I have been fortunate, or lucky, whichever you call it, but I’ve also done a lot of calling good luck to bring it my way.”

Newly discovered oilfields of the mid-1920s brought prosperity — and traffic jams — to Seminole, Oklahoma. Photo courtesy Oklahoma Oil Museum.

Slick’s leases in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas produced millions of barrels of oil. Production from his wells reached 35,000 barrels of oil a day in 1929, and he was proclaimed the largest independent oil operator in the United States with a net worth estimated from $35 million and up to $100 million.

By 1930, in the Oklahoma City field alone, Slick had 45 wells being drilled, more than 30 wells completed, and the capacity to produce 200,000 barrels of crude daily. Across the Mid-Continent, stories of Tom Slick’s business acumen and integrity grew with his fortune.

It was often told how Slick once closed a $100,000 deal for a prized Seminole lease on a street corner. He met the owner on the street and inquired, “What do you want for that lease’ ‘A hundred thousand dollars,’ replied the owner. ‘It’s a sale, bring in your deeds,’ said Slick.”

Thomas B. Slick is among those honored outside the Sam Noble Museum, University of Oklahoma, in Norman.

Thomas B. Slick’s death from a stroke in August 1930 at the age of 46 abruptly ended an oilfield career that had supplied America with the petroleum it needed to grow.

“Oil derricks in the Oklahoma City Field stood silent for one hour in tribute,” reported the Oklahoma Historical Society. Slick’s biggest strike came a week after he died when his Campbell No. 1 well in Oklahoma City produced 43,200 barrels of oil per day.

Stories about the “King of the Wildcatters” and his oilfield discoveries would spread across the Mid-Continent. Thomas B. Slick, — no longer known as “Mad Tom” or “Dry Hole Slick” — joined other Oklahoma petroleum industry leaders honored at the Conoco Oil Pioneers of Oklahoma Plaza.

By the end of the 20th century, more than one-half million Oklahoma oil and natural gas wells were drilled since an oilfield discovery at Bartlesville in 1897 (learn more in First Oklahoma Oil Well). 

More about Slick and his extraordinary oilfield career can be found in King of the Wildcatters, the Life and Times of Tom Slick, 1883–1930 by Ray Miles, professor of history and dean of the College of Liberal Arts at McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana.

For example, Miles relates that in 1933, a friend and business partner of the Oklahoma wildcatter was kidnapped and held for ransom. Once released, Charles Urschel assisted the FBI in catching his abductors, including George “Machine Gun” Kelly, who was sentenced to life in Alcatraz.

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Recommended Reading: King of the Wildcatters, the Life and Times of Tom Slick, 1883–1930. (2004); The Oklahoma City Oil Field in Pictures (2005); 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 (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please support this energy education website, subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, and help expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. 

Citation Information – Article Title: “Oklahoma’s King of the Wildcatters.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/wildcatter-tom-slick. Last Updated: March 9, 2026. Original Published Date: December 1, 2004.

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A series of oil and natural gas discoveries at Sour Lake, Texas — near the famous 1901 gusher at Beaumont — helped launch the major oil company Texaco.

Originally known as Sour Lake Springs because of sulfurous spring water popular for its healing properties, a series of oil discoveries brought wealth and new petroleum companies to Hardin County in southeastern Texas.

“A forest of oil well derricks at Sour Lake, Texas,” circa early1900s, courtesy the W.D. Hornaday Collection, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin. Oil discoveries at the resort town northwest of the world-famous 1901 Spindletop gusher transformed the Texas Company into Texaco.

As the science of petroleum exploration and production evolved, some geologists predicted oil was trapped at a salt dome at Sour Lake, similar to that of Beaumont’s Spindletop Hill formation, which was producing massive amounts of oil. 

According to Charles Warner in Texas Oil & Gas Since 1543, in November 1901 an exploratory well found “hot salt water impregnated with sulfur between 800 and 850 feet…and four oil sands about 10 feet thick at a depth of approximately 1,040 feet.”

Warner noted that the Sour Lake Springs field’s discovery well came four months later when a second attempt by the Great Western Company drilled “north of the old hotel building” in the vicinity of earlier shallow wells.

A monument marks the site where in 1903 the Fee No. 3 well flowed at 5,000 barrels of oil a day, launching the Texas Company into becoming Texaco.

“This well secured gusher production at a depth of approximately 683 feet on March 7, 1902,” Warner reported. “The well penetrated 40 feet of oil sand. The flow of oil was accompanied by a considerable amount of loose sand, and it was necessary to close the well in from time to time and bail out the sand, after which the well would respond with excellent flows.”

As more discoveries followed, Joseph “Buckskin Joe” Cullinan and Arnold Schlaet were among those who rushed to the area from their offices in Beaumont.

The Texas Company

The most significant company that started during the Spindletop oil boom was The Texas Company, according to historian Elton Gish.

“Cullinan worked in the Pennsylvania oil industry and later went to Corsicana, Texas, about 1898 when oil was first discovered in that district, where he became the most prosperous operator in the field,” reported Gish in his “History of the Texas Company and Port Arthur Works Refinery.”

Cullinan formed the Petroleum Iron Works, building oil storage tanks in the Beaumont area — where he was introduced to Schlaet. “When the Spindletop boom came in January 1901, Mr. Cullinan decided to visit Beaumont,” Gish noted. Schlaet managed the oil business of two brothers, New York leather merchants.

Named after its New York City telegraph address, the Texaco brand became official in 1959. Postcard of a Texaco service station next to a cafe in Kingman, Arizona.

“Schlaet’s field superintendent, Charles Miller, traveled to Beaumont in 1901 to witness the Spindletop activity and met with Cullinan, whom he knew from the oil business in Pennsylvania. He liked Cullinan’s plans and asked Schlaet to join them in Beaumont.”

According to Texaco, Cullinan and Schlaet formed the Texas Company on April 7, 1902, by absorbing the Texas Fuel Company and inheriting its office in Beaumont. Texas Fuel had organized just one year earlier to purchase Spindletop oil, develop storage and transportation networks, and sell the oil to northern refineries.

By November 1902, the new Texas Company was establishing a new refinery in Port Arthur as well as 20 storage tanks, building its first marine vessel, and equipping an oil terminal to serve sugar plantations along the Mississippi River.

Fee No. 3 Discovery

The Texas Company struck oil at Sour Lake Springs in January 1903, “after gambling its future on the site’s drilling rights,” the company explained. “The discovery, during a heavy downpour near Sour Lake’s mineral springs, turned the company into a major oil producer overnight, validating the risk-taking insight of company co-founder J.S. Cullinan and the ability of driller Walter Sharp.”

A Texaco station was among the 2012 indoor exhibits featured at the National Route 66 Museum in Elk City, Oklahoma. Photo by Bruce Wells.

Their 1903 Hardin County discovery at Sour Lake Springs — the Fee No. 3 well — flowed at 5,000 barrels a day, securing the Texas Company’s success in petroleum exploration, production, transportation, and refining. Sharp founded the Sharp-Hughes Tool Company in 1908 with Howard Hughes Sr. 

High oil production levels from the Sour Lake field and other successful wells in the Humble oilfield (1905) secured the company’s financial base, according to L. W. Kemp and Cherie Voris in the Handbook of Texas Online.

“In 1905 the Texas Company linked these two fields by pipelines to Port Arthur, ninety miles away, and built its first refinery there. That same year the company acquired an asphalt refinery at nearby Port Neches,” the authors noted.

“In 1908 the company completed the ambitious venture of a pipeline from the Glenn Pool, in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), to its Southeast Texas refineries,” added Kemp and Voris.

Telegraph Address: Texaco

As early as 1905, the Texas Company had established marketing facilities not only throughout the United States but also in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Panama.

The Texas Company registered “Texaco” as a trademark in 1909.

The telegraph address for the company’s New York office is “Texaco” — a name soon applied to its products. The company registered its first trademark, the original red star with a green capital letter “T” superimposed on it in 1909. The letter remained an essential component of the logo for decades. 

In August 1926, the Texas Corporation incorporated in Delaware (from Texas) and by an exchange of shares acquired outstanding stock of The Texas Company, which was dissolved the next year.

The new corporation became the parent company of numerous “Texas Company” — Texaco — entities and other subsidiaries, according to Jim Hinds of Columbus, Indiana (see Histories of Indian Refining, Havoline, and Texaco). By 1928, Texaco operated more than 4,000 gasoline stations in 48 states. It already was a major oil company when it officially renamed itself Texaco in 1959.

1987 Bankruptcy

Texaco lost a 1985 court battle following its purchase of Getty Oil Company. In February 1987 a Texas court upheld the decision against Texaco for having initiated an illegal takeover of Getty Oil after Pennzoil had made a bid for the company. Texaco filed for bankruptcy in April 1987.

The companies settled their historic $10.3 billion legal battle for $3 billion when Pennzoil agreed to drop its demand for interest. The Los Angeles Times reported the compromise was vital for Texaco emerging from bankruptcy, a haven sought to stop Pennzoil from enforcing the largest court judgment ever awarded at the time. 

On October 9, 2001, Chevron and Texaco agreed to a merger that created ChevronTexaco — renamed Chevron in 2005. Although the Sour Lake Springs oil boom was surpassed by other Texas discoveries, it has remained the birthplace of Texaco.

Learn more about southeastern Texas petroleum history in Spindletop creates Modern Petroleum Industry and Prophet of Spindletop.

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Recommended Reading: The Texaco Story, The First Fifty Years 1902 – 1952 by Texas Company (1952). Texaco’s Port Arthur Works, A Legacy of Spindletop and Sour Lake (2003); Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery (2008). 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 support AOGHS to help maintain this energy education website, a monthly email newsletter, This Week in Oil and Gas History News, and expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Sour Lake produces Texaco.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/sour-lake-produces-texaco. Last Updated: February 28, 2026. Original Published Date: April 5, 2014.

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By the 1920s, Oklahoma’s petroleum exploration leases auctioned in the shade of a “Million Dollar Elm” brought prosperity to the Osage Nation. Production from Osage County alone launched the careers of Frank Phillips, J. Paul Getty, Bill Skelly, E.W. Marland, Harry Sinclair — and Clark Gable.

A circa 1920s painting depicts one of the many lease auctions that took place under the “Million Dollar Elm” next to the Osage Nation Tribal Council House in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.

In the spring of 2003, the Osage Nation opened a “Million Dollar Elm” casino a few miles from its council house at Pawhuska, Oklahoma. The name came straight from Osage Reservation petroleum history. Multi-million dollar lease auctions took place in the shade of a giant elm next to the council house.

Osage County, at more than 2,250 square miles, is the largest county in Oklahoma — larger than Delaware or Rhode Island. On the grounds atop Agency Hill between the county courthouse and the Osage Tribal Council House, today stands a symbolic elm where auctions regularly took place on hot summer afternoons.

Soon after Oklahoma statehood, more Osage discoveries brought thousands to Bartlesville, Hominy, Fairfax, Grainola, and Burbank. All the oilfields produced a high-quality, easily refined oil. First drilled in 1920, the Burbank field and several others soon became some of the richest in Oklahoma.

Colonel Elmer Ellsworth Walters, Osage Nation auctioneer seen here on June 14, 1921, sold millions of dollars of leases in the shade of an elm tree. Photo courtesy Bartlesville Area History Museum.

At its peak, the Burbank oilfield produced more than 70,000 barrels a day from more than 1,800 wells. Phillips Petroleum made a fortune there. Other petroleum companies got their start in Osage oilfields, including Conoco (originally Marland Oil), Skelly Oil, Carter Oil (later incorporated into Standard Oil), and Gypsy Oil Company (later Gulf).

Traces of oil had long been noted in the area, including slicks on creeks and oil seeps. The southern end of the Flint Hills, which ranges down from Kansas, has rocks 298 million years old, according to Jenk Jones Jr. of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas.

The Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Company made the first drilling deal with the Osage Tribe, he noted in 1991. The oil company received rights to all drilling in the Osage Nation for 10 years, beginning in 1896. The next year, the territory’s first commercial producer was completed, the Nellie Johnstone No. 1 well, in what is now a park in Bartlesville. 

All of Osage County was open for bidding after 1916 – just in time for the greatest years of the Osage boom, triggered by demands of World War I and the postwar growth in automobiles.

“To get a sense of how the oil business exploded in the Osage, there were about 6,000 barrels produced in 1900, more than 11 million in 1914. The Osage boom and a vast leap in the number of automobiles coincided remarkably well,” Jones explained in a Tulsa World article.

Colonel Walters, on March 2, 1922, sold a 160-acre Osage Nation oil lease for the  for $1 million. In 1924, he auctioned another 160-acre Osage lease for $2 million. Detail of photo in Oil! Titan of the Southwest by Carl Coke Rister.

During the height of the drilling boom from 1919 to 1928 northwest of Tulsa, more than $202 million was paid to the tribe in oil and natural gas royalties, bonuses, interest and land rentals. “The Osage fields were an oilman’s dream,” reported Jones. “The oil was a high-grade, with a good conversion to gasoline ratio. It was easily refined, with a very high percentage of kerosene. It was free of sulfur and asphalt.”

According to Corey Bone of the Oklahoma Historical Society, the profitable auctions of Osage mineral rights were based on “headrights” from a 1906 tribal population count.

“Unlike other landholders, the Osage were able to retain collective ownership of subsurface mineral rights, rather than having to accept allotments to individual owners,” Bone explained. “Instead, tribal members received ‘headrights’ that assured them an equal share of mineral rights sales equivalent to income from 658 acres.”

She added that a headright could not be sold, but an individual could sell his or her surface rights. “An average Osage family of a husband, wife, and three children would receive more than $65,000 a year in 1926,” Bone noted.

By 1939, Osage individuals had received more than $100 million in royalties and bonuses.  Learn about Walters, his leases auctions — the very dark history of Osage headrights in Million Dollar Auctioneer. 

Million Dollar Auctioneer

Great petroleum wealth for the Osage people brought criminal conspiracies — and the murder of Osage for headrights to their land. The murders eventually led to an FBI investigation, convictions — and changes to the law in 1925.

When the “Reign of Terror” news finally made national headlines, it obscured the good work of a longtime friend and respected auctioneer of the tribe’s leases. The Osage would erect a statue to their auctioneer, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth Walters, in his hometown of Skedee. 

Born at the end of the Civil War in 1865, his parents had named him after the first Union martyr of the Civil War, Col. Elmer Ellsworth of the 11th New York Volunteers. His friendship helped earn the Osage millions of dollars.

Map of townships, Osage County, Oklahoma, courtesy OKGenWeb.

As the auctioneer for the Osage, Walters worked for about $10 a day, beginning in 1912. Later, surrounded by bidding oil company owners E.W. Marland, William Skelly, and the Phillips brothers, he regularly set new lease sales records. 

Walters would become greatly admired among the Osage of Pawhuska. “He knew the oilmen intimately and was an expert at getting them to raise bids,” Jones explained. “So subtle were their signals that L.E. Phillips reportedly ‘bid’ $100,000 for a lease by brushing a fly away from his nose.”

The elm’s name was not given by tribal leaders — but by reporters and magazine writers who were dramatizing the events when founders of the world’s greatest oil companies came in person to bid. It truly earned its name when 18 tracts brought bonuses of $1 million on a single day, November 11, 1912.

Auctions by Walters would earn about $157 million for the Osage tribe by 1928, two years after the Osage Nation dedicated a statue to their auctioneer, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth Walters, in his hometown of Skedee. The statue depicts the auctioneer shaking hands with his friend Osage Chief Bacon Rind.

Osage Oil Boom

A large cast of national characters is linked to petroleum exploration and production on the Osage Nation. Future president Herbert Hoover, an orphan, spent summer months in Pawhuska after his uncle Major Lahan J. Miles was appointed agent to the Osages in 1878.

Visitors to Barnsdall, Oklahoma, can view a registered petroleum landmark in the middle of Main Street that is considered to be the only such oil well in the world. Photo by Bruce Wells.

Southeast of Pawhuska, the town Pershing was an oil boom town named for Gen. John J. Pershing, leader of U.S. forces in Europe during World War I.

Tom Mix, future silent film star, was a town marshal in Dewey just east of the Osage County border. The Wild West show of the 101 Ranch in Kay County west of the Osage gave him the boost that sent him to Hollywood. Clark Gable worked as a roustabout in the Osage oilfields, especially around Barnsdall and Pershing, before heading to California for stardom (see Boom Town Burkburnett).

Memories of what took place beneath the Osage Nation elm did not fade after the original tree died in the 1980s. A commemorative replacement elm, dedicated during a September 15, 2006, ceremony, has grown new roots into the historic site.

Since the early 2000s, visitors have gambled at five Osage Nation Hotels that began as Million Dollar Elm Casinos. The Bartlesville Osage Nation community in 2023 celebrated the opening of a new Osage Casino Hotel built on 125 acres near “the casino up on the hill”– the original, Osage Million Dollar Elm Casino that opened in 2006.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma City-based Chaparral Energy and other petroleum companies began working on technologies to increase production from Osage oilfields that could add more than $10 billion to Osage County and provide the Osage Nation with $1 billion in royalty payments over coming decades.

Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Jenk Jones Jr. and his March 1, 2003, “Osage County History” docent orientation presentation, Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Cottonwood Falls, Kansas.

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Recommended Reading: The Underground Reservation: Osage Oil (1985); Oil in Oklahoma (1976); Killers of the Flower Moon (2018). 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 support AOGHS to help maintain this energy education website, a monthly email newsletter, This Week in Oil and Gas History News, and expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells.

Citation Information – Article Title: “Million Dollar Elm,” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/million-dollar-elm. Last Updated: March 1, 2026. Original Published Date: March 24, 2014.

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Swallowing “tar pills” supposedly had been curing ills since the mid-1800s, but Alabama’s petroleum industry officially began in 1944 with a Choctaw County well drilled by a Texas wildcatter. On February 17, independent producer Haroldson Lafayette “H.L.” Hunt completed his Jackson No. 1 well after discovering Alabama’s first oilfield.

H.L. Hunt had found success in the earliest Arkansas oilfields of the 1920s and even greater success in the East Texas oilfield of the 1930s. He now had revealed the Gilbertown oilfield of western Alabama, about 50 miles southeast of Meridian, Mississippi.

Geological Map of Alabama, printed in 1849 by Michael Tuomey, professor of geology, mineralogy, and agricultural chemistry at the University of Alabama. Tuomey published his First Biennial Report of the Geology of Alabama in 1850. Map courtesy University of Alabama Libraries Special Collections.

Despite limited knowledge of the state’s geology, regions with oil and natural gas seeps had attracted interest as early as the mid-19th century. Before Hunt’s Choctaw County wildcat well, 350 dry holes had been drilled in Alabama. 

Geologist and petroleum historian Ray Sorenson has investigated the earliest reports of petroleum in all producing states. By the early 2020s, his ongoing project documented the first signs of oil in the United States, Canada, and many parts of the world (see Exploring Earliest Signs of Oil).

In Alabama’s case, Sorenson uncovered an account by an early expert in the scientific field of geology. The first Alabama state geologist, Michael Tuomey, described reports of a “mineral tar” and cited an 1840s account of finding natural oil seeps six miles from Oakville in Lawrence County.

With quantities of oil and water emerging from a crevice in limestone, Tuomey observed that “the tar, or bitumen, floats on the surface, a black film very cohesive and insoluble in water.”

The A.R. Jackson No. 1 well in 1944 revealed an Alabama oilfield near the Mississippi border. Photo courtesy Hunt Oil Company.

Similar to “Kentucky oil,” Alabama’s Lawrence County oil became popular for its medicinal qualities. Oil from the county was claimed to be “a known cure for Scrofula, Cancerous Sores, Rheumatism, Dyspepsia,” and other diseases.

“Patients visiting the Spring find the tar taken and swallowed as pills, the most efficient form of the remedy,” Tuomey quoted the observation from “Tar Spring of Lawrence” in the 1858 Second Biennial Report On the Geology of Alabama (published one year after his death).

Tuomey served as the state geologist of South Carolina from 1844 to 1847, and as the first state geologist of Alabama from 1848 until his death in 1857. Tuomey published his Geological Map of Alabama in 1849.

In addition to oil, traces of natural gas were discovered in Alabama in the late 1880s, and by 1902, natural gas was being supplied to Huntsville and the town of Hazel Green, according to Alabama historian Alan Cockrell.

“In 1909, a small discovery by Eureka Oil and Gas at Fayette fueled that city’s streetlights for a time, but no natural gas was recovered anywhere in the state for several decades afterward,” he added. Learn about the earliest oilfield discoveries in other producing states in First Oil Discoveries.

Gilbertown Oil Discovery

According to Cockrell, Alabama’s oil and natural gas industry did not truly begin until H.L. Hunt of Dallas, Texas, drilled in Choctaw County near the Mississippi border and discovered the Gilbertown oilfield.

Concrete foundations are all that remain of Alabama’s first oil well, the A.R. Jackson Well No. 1, completed in 1944 near Gilbertown. Photo courtesy Explore Rural S.W. Alabama.

After five weeks of drilling, the well was completed on February 17, 1944, at 2,585 feet in the Selma chalk of the Upper Cretaceous. Hunt’s A.R. Jackson Well No. 1, two miles southwest of downtown Gilbertown, had reached a total depth of 5,380 feet before being “plugged back” to its most productive oil-producing geologic formation.

H.L. Hunt’s first Alabama oil well produced just 30 barrels of oil a day but launched the state’s petroleum industry. “The discovery of this well led to the creation of the State Oil and Gas Board of Alabama in 1945 and to the development and growth of the petroleum industry in Alabama,” notes an Alabama historic marker erected at the site. 

Deeper drilling led to more Alabama petroleum discoveries in the 1980s. Map courtesy Encyclopedia of Alabama.

The first oilfield would produce 15 million barrels of oil, “not a lot by modern standards but enough to make ‘oil fever’ spread rapidly,” Cockrell noted in “Oil and Gas Industry in Alabama” in 2008. The search for another oilfield took 11 more years.

The 1955 oil discovery at Citronelle, a town above a geologic salt dome, finally launched a new drilling boom; five new Alabama oilfields were discovered by 1967. Mobil Oil Company drilled Alabama’s first successful offshore natural gas well in 1981.

As production technologies advance, geologists believe opportunities exist in the “hard shales of the deep Black Warrior Basin beneath Pickens and Tuscaloosa counties and in the thick fractured shales of St. Clair and neighboring counties,” according to Cockrell.

By 2022, more than 17,500 oil and natural gas wells had been drilled in Alabama since the state’s first commercial oil discovery in 1944. According to the Washington, DC-based Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), about 10 percent of the Alabama wells produced oil, 59 percent natural gas, and 30 percent (about 5,000 wells) were nonproductive.

Mapping Mineral Riches 

From the journal Cartographic Perspectives of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS):

Settlement of the newly available land enabled Alabama to move rapidly from being a part of the Mississippi Territory to its own Alabama Territory and finally to statehood in 1819. The favorable climate and rich soil brought large plantations and slavery.

Appointed State Geologist of Alabama in 1848, Michael Tuomey served until his death in 1857.

Michael Tuomey (1805-1857), professor of geology at the University of Alabama in the 1840s, had attempted to lead Alabama’s economy away from slavery-based agriculture. In 1849, he produced the first survey of the state’s mineral wealth. His geological map of Alabama showed exactly where the state’s natural riches were located. The efforts of Tuomey and others were rejected, as were similar efforts in other southern states.

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Recommended Reading: Lost Worlds in Alabama Rocks: A Guide (2000). Drilling Ahead, The Quest for Oil in the Deep South, 1945-2005 (2005). Your Amazon purchases benefit the American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please support AOGHS to help maintain this energy education website, a monthly email newsletter, This Week in Oil and Gas History News, and expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. 

Citation Information – Article Title: “First Alabama Oil Well.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/first-alabama-oil-well. Last Updated: February 13, 2026. Original Published Date: October 21, 2017.

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The search for commercial amounts of petroleum in Nevada began in 1907 with a well drilled southwest of Reno. After reaching a depth of 1,890 feet, the remote wildcat in Washoe County proved unproductive — an expensive “dry hole.”

A second exploratory well was rumored to have been drilled seeking an oilfield northwest of Reno, but few details about it survived since drilling permits were not required until 1953.

Nevada’s petroleum exploration would remain on pause for decades after the attempt near Reno, according to Larry Garside, a research geologist for the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology.

Nevada in 2024 produced about 175,000 barrels of oil, primarily from Nye County. Half of the royalties from leasing go to the state. Photo courtesy Nevada Bureau of Land Management.

“Rumors of oil discoveries and plans for oil development abounded in the early 1900s in Reno and several other Nevada towns,” he explained in 1988. “Newspapers commonly had articles on the purported favorability of certain regions for oil.”

The state geologist added that Nevada’s early 20th-century oil promotional activity coincided with the development of the internal combustion engine and phenomenal growth in the U.S. petroleum industry to meet gasoline demand (see Cantankerous Combustion – First U.S. Auto Show).

While Texas and Oklahoma oilfields multiplied, the few exploratory wells in Nevada continued to prove fruitless. One of the unsuccessful wells was drilled in northwestern Nevada by the Western Pacific Railroad Company along its tracks near the siding of Sulphur in Black Rock Desert.

Garside could find few drilling records until the 1920s, and those indicated more unsuccessful wells drilled throughout the Great Depression and World War II.

Since its first commercial well in 1954, Nevada has been a frontier for small oilfields, including in the historic Railroad Valley in northeastern Nye County (bottom center). Map courtesy Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology.

First Nevada Oil Well

On February 12, 1954, Shell Oil Company finally completed the first Nevada oil well that proved commercial. “Unfortunately, it took nearly half a century and 85 dry holes before the state’s complicated geology yielded a producing oil well,” Garside noted.

Shell’s Eagle Springs No. 1 well found oil in Railroad Valley in Nye County. The discovery well reached as deep as 10,360 feet before being completed at a productive interval between 6,450 and 6,730 feet.

Despite the Eagle Springs oilfield producing 3.8 million barrels of oil by 1988, it was the state’s only oilfield for decades as more dry holes followed.

“Although this discovery encouraged drillers and speculators to drill there and elsewhere in Nevada, the next field was not found for 22 years, during which time about 100 dry holes were drilled,” Garside reported in Petroleum Exploration and Production in Nevada.

The state’s second significant oil discovery came in 1976, when Northwest Exploration Company completed the Trap Spring No. 1 well in Railroad Valley, five miles west of the Eagle Springs oilfield. The Trap Spring well produced more than seven million barrels of oil over the next two decades.

Annual crude oil production in Nevada peaked at about 4 million barrels of oil in 1990.

A third discovery came in 1978 with the Northwest Exploration’s Currant No. 1 well drilled in Railroad Valley, 6 miles north of the Eagle Springs Field. The well yielded just 646 barrels of oil but was still producing a couple of hundred barrels of oil per year in the late 1990s.

The pace of Nevada oil discoveries accelerated considerably as exploration and drilling technologies improved. Beginning in 1984, the Grant Canyon No. 3 well averaged 2,000 barrels of oil per day; its production reached as high as 4,300 barrels of oil a day in 1987 — the most of any onshore well in the continental United States. 

According to the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, the small oil wells led to more drilling and the 1983 discovery of the Grant Canyon field in Railroad Valley, which tripled Nevada’s oil production.

Detail from a 2013 map of Nevada oil and natural gas wells with red dots indicating producing wells. Data provided by University of Nevada, Reno, courtesy the Conservation Biology Institute.

At the beginning of the 21st century, more than a dozen Nevada oilfields produced about 50 million barrels of oil, the bureau noted, adding the Grant Canyon oilfield produced more than 20.7 million barrels of oil from three wells between 1983 and 2003. “The possibility of another Grant Canyon field is what keeps oil companies interested in Nevada,” noted one bureau geologist.

Although recent drilling has focused on Nye County’s Railroad Valley, Nevada remains a frontier state with 11 small oilfields in three areas of the state, according to the Department of Energy.

“Nevada produces some oil, although total production is small relative to that of major oil states,” noted DOE’s Office of Fossil Fuels in the 2019 report “Nevada Natural Gas Flaring and Venting Regulations.”

“Most of the oil has come from the Great Basin in the eastern part of the state, primarily Railroad Valley (Nye and White Pine counties) and Pine Valley (Elko and Eureka Counties), the report noted. The state’s peak production exceeded 4 million barrels if oil in 1990. 

Annual production has declined to less than 250,000 barrels of oil since the late 2010s, and the Nevada Division of Minerals has reported a total of seven oil wells completed from 2017 to 2021 — bringing the state’s total completions to 742 wells since 1955. 

“The federal government owns 81.07 percent of Nevada’s total land, 56,961,778 acres out of 70,264,320 total acres,” added Fluid Minerals Program Manager Cortney Luxford in her Summary of Oil, Geothermal, and Dissolved Minerals Activity.

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Recommended Reading:  Roadside Geology of Nevada (2017). 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 support AOGHS to help maintain this energy education website, a monthly email newsletter, This Week in Oil and Gas History News, and expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells.

Citation Information – Article Title: “First Nevada Oil Well.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/first-nevada-oil-well. Last Updated: February 7, 2025. Original Published Date: February 8, 2016.

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