Investors from New Haven, Connecticut, organized the Seneca Oil Company with $300,000 in capital after purchasing the Titusville leases of the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, which had been founded in 1854 by George Bissell.

Seneca Oil drilled the first U.S. well. Image courtesy New Haven Museum.

Bissell, who had investigated oil seeps south of Titusville, originated the idea of producing and refining oil to make kerosene lamp fuel. The New Haven investors nevertheless excluded him from the oil exploration company. Learn more in George Bissell’s Oil Seeps.

March 24, 1989 – Exxon Valdez hits Bligh Reef

After almost 12 years of routine passages by oil tankers through Prince William Sound, Alaska, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, resulting in an oil spill affecting 1,300 miles of shoreline. Vessels carrying North Slope oil had safely passed through the sound more than 8,700 times.

Eight of Exxon Valdez’s 11 tanks were punctured, and an estimated 260,000 barrels of oil spilled, affecting hundreds of miles of coastline. Investigators later found that an error in navigation by the third mate, possibly due to fatigue or excessive workload, had caused the accident.

Shown being towed away from Bligh Reef, the Exxon Valdez had been outside shipping lanes when it ran aground in March 1989. Photo courtesy Erik Hill, Anchorage Daily News.

When the 987-foot tanker hit the reef that night, “the system designed to carry two million barrels of North Slope oil to West Coast and Gulf Coast markets daily had worked perhaps too well,” noted the Alaska Oil Spill Commission. “At least partly because of the success of the Valdez tanker trade, a general complacency had come to permeate the operation and oversight of the entire system.” Learn more in Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.

March 26, 1930 – “Wild Mary Sudik” makes Headlines

What would become one of Oklahoma’s most famous wells struck a high-pressure formation about 6,500 feet beneath Oklahoma City and oil erupted skyward. The Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Company’s Mary Sudik No. 1 flowed for 11 days before being brought under control. It produced about 20,000 barrels of oil and 200 million cubic feet of natural gas daily, becoming a worldwide sensation.

Pressure from the Oklahoma City oilfield Wilcox formation proved difficult to control. Movie newsreels soon featured the 1930 “Wild Mary” gusher nationwide. Photo courtesy Oklahoma History Center.

Efforts to control the well in Oklahoma City’s prolific oilfield (discovered in 1928) were featured on movie newsreels and national radio broadcasts. It was later learned that after drilling more than a mile deep, the exhausted crew did not realize the Wilcox Sand oil formation was permeated with highly pressurized natural gas.

Map of the Wilcox Sands formation of the Oklahoma City oilfield in the 1940s.

Although the first ram-type blowout preventer (BOP) had been patented in 1926, deep oil and natural gas fields would take time to tame. Learn more in “Wild Mary Sudik.” 

March 27, 1855 – Canadian Chemist trademarks Kerosene

Canadian physician and chemist Abraham Gesner (1797-1864) patented a process to distill coal into kerosene. “I have invented and discovered a new and useful manufacture or composition of matter, being a new liquid hydrocarbon, which I denominate Kerosene,” he proclaimed. Because his new illuminating fluid was extracted from coal, consumers called it “coal oil” as often as kerosene.

On March 17, 2000, Canada issued one million commemorative stamps featuring kerosene inventor Abraham Gesner.

Gesner, considered the father of the Canadian petroleum industry, in 1842 established Canada’s first natural history museum, the New Brunswick Museum, which today houses one of Canada’s oldest geological collections. America’s petroleum industry began when it was learned oil could be distilled into a lamp fuel. Learn more in Camphene to Kerosene Lamps.

March 27, 1975 – First Pipe laid for Trans-Alaskan Pipeline

With the laying of the first section of pipe in Alaska, construction began on the largest private construction project in American history at the time. Recognized as a landmark of engineering, the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline system, including pumping stations and the Valdez Marine Terminal, would cost $8 billion by the time it was completed in 1977.

Learn more in Trans-Alaska Pipeline History.

March 27, 1999 – Offshore Platform Rocket Launch Test

The Ocean Odyssey, a converted semi-submersible drilling platform, launched a Russian rocket that placed a demonstration satellite into geostationary orbit.

The Zenit-3SL rocket, fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene rocket fuel, was part of Sea Launch, a Boeing-led consortium of companies from the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Norway. The platform had once been used by Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) for North Sea exploration. 

With an orbital test on March 27, 1999, the Ocean Odyssey, a converted semi-submersible drilling platform, became the world’s first floating equatorial launch pad. Photo courtesy Sea Launch.

“The Sea Launch rocket successfully completed its maiden flight today,” Boeing announced. “The event, which placed a demonstration payload into geostationary transfer orbit, marked the first commercial launch from a floating platform at sea.”

The Sea Launch consortium provided orbital launch services until 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine. Learn more in Offshore Rocket Launcher.

March 28, 1886 – Natural Gas Boom begins in Indiana

Petroleum exploration companies converged on Portland, Indiana, after the Eureka Gas and Oil Company discovered a natural gas field after drilling just 700 feet deep. The well began producing two months after a spectacular natural gas well about 100 miles to the northeast — the “Great Karg Well” of Findlay, Ohio.

According to industrialist Andrew Carnegie, natural gas daily replaced 10,000 tons of coal for making steel.

Portland foundry owner Henry Sees had followed the news from Findlay. He persuaded local investors to drill for Indiana natural gas. In western Pennsylvania, reserves found near Pittsburg had encouraged industrialists there to replace their coal-fired steel and glass foundries with the first large-scale industrial use of natural gas. 

Indiana would become the world’s largest natural gas producer, thanks to its Trenton limestone stretching more than 5,100 square miles across 17 counties. Within three years, more than 200 companies were drilling, distributing, and selling natural gas. Learn more in Indiana Natural Gas Boom.

March 28, 1905 – Oil Discovered in North Louisiana

A small oil discovery in Caddo Parish launched a drilling boom in northern Louisiana and brought economic prosperity to Oil City. The Offenhauser No. 1 well was completed at a depth of 1,556 feet but yielded just five barrels of oil a day and was abandoned. Far more productive wells quickly followed as the Caddo-Pine Island oilfield 20 miles northwest of Shreveport expanded into 80,000 acres.

The Shreveport Chamber of Commerce in 1955 dedicated a 40-foot monument commemorating the 50th anniversary of Caddo Parish’s first oil well. Photo by Bruce Wells.

“This part of Louisiana, of course, was built on the oil and gas industry, and those visitors interested in the technical aspects of oilfield work will find the museum particularly appealing,” notes the Louisiana State Oil and Gas Museum (formerly the Caddo-Pine Island Oil and Historical Museum).

More oilfield history can be found in Shreveport, where natural gas was discovered in 1870 — thanks to an ice plant’s water well. To discourage natural gas flaring, Louisiana passed its first conservation law in 1906. Learn more in Louisiana Oil City Museum.

March 29, 1819 – Birthday of Father of the Petroleum Industry 

Edwin Laurentine Drake (1819-1880) was born in Greenville, New York. Forty years later, he used a steam-powered cable-tool rig to drill the first commercial U.S. oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania. The former railroad conductor overcame many financial and technical obstacles to make “Drake’s Folly” a milestone in U.S. petroleum history.

Edwin L. Drake (1819-1880) invented a method of driving a pipe down to protect the integrity of the first U.S. oil well. Photo courtesy Drake Well Museum.

Drake pioneered using iron casing to isolate his well from nearby Oil Creek. “In order to overcome the hurdles before him, he invented a ‘drive pipe’ or ‘conductor,’ an invention he unfortunately did not patent,” noted historian Urja Davé in 2008. “Mr. Drake conceived the idea of driving a pipe down to the rock through which to start the drill.”

Determined to find oil for refining into kerosene, Drake drilled near natural seeps and found oil on August 27, 1859, at a depth of 69.5 feet. Learn more in Edwin Drake and his Oil Well.

March 29, 1938 – Magnolia Oilfield found in Arkansas

“Kerlyn Wildcat Strike In Southern Arkansas is Sensation of the Oil Country,” proclaimed the local newspaper when a well drilled by Kerlyn Oil Company revealed the 100-million-barrel Magnolia oilfield, adding to the 1920s giant oilfield discoveries at El Dorado and Smackover. 

Drilling on the Barnett No. 1 well had been suspended because of a lack of money, but geologist and company Vice President Dean McGee urged drilling deeper. He was rewarded with a giant oilfield discovery at the depth of 7,650 feet. McGee later would become an industry pioneer in offshore exploration. Visit the Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources in Smackover.

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Recommended Reading: Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry (2009); The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Perspectives on Modern World History (2011); The Oklahoma Petroleum Industry (1980); Oil Lamps The Kerosene Era In North America (1978); Amazing Pipeline Stories: How Building the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Transformed Life in America’s Last Frontier (1997); The Extraction State, A History of Natural Gas in America (2021); Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry (2009); Texas Oil and Gas, Postcard History (2013); Early Louisiana and Arkansas Oil: A Photographic History, 1901-1946 (1982). 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, This Week in Oil and Gas History News, and help expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.

The post This Week in Petroleum History: March 23 – 29 appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

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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“No one anticipated any unusual problems as the Exxon Valdez left the Alyeska Pipeline Terminal at 9:12 p.m., Alaska Standard Time,” an account by the Alaska Oil Spill Commission would later report about the March 24, 1989, offshore disaster. 

After nearly a dozen years of routine daily passages through Prince William Sound, Alaska, an oil tanker ran aground, rupturing the hull. Supertanker Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef and spilled more than 260,000 barrels of oil, affecting hundreds of miles of coastline. Some consider the spill amount used by Alaska’s Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council as too conservative.

Field studies continue to examine the effects of the Exxon supertanker’s disastrous grounding on Bligh Reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. Photo courtesy Erik Hill, Anchorage Daily News.

A General Complacency

When the 987-foot tanker hit the reef shortly after midnight, “the system designed to carry two million barrels of North Slope oil to West Coast and Gulf Coast markets daily had worked perhaps too well,” according to the Alaska Oil Spill Commission’s initial report. 

“At least partly because of the success of the Valdez tanker trade, a general complacency had come to permeate the operation and oversight of the entire system,” the commission noted. Complacency about giant oil tankers ended on March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef.

“The vessel came to rest facing roughly southwest, perched across its middle on a pinnacle of Bligh Reef,” added the commission’s report. “Eight of 11 cargo tanks were punctured. Computations aboard the Exxon Valdez showed that 5.8 million gallons had gushed out of the tanker in the first three and a quarter hours.”

“Eight of 11 cargo tanks were punctured. Computations aboard the Exxon Valdez showed that 5.8 million gallons had gushed out of the tanker in the first three and a quarter hours.”

Tankers carrying North Slope crude oil had safely transited Prince William Sound more than 8,700 times during the previous 12 years. Improved shipbuilding technologies resulted in supersized vessels.

“Whereas tankers in the 1950s carried a crew of 40 to 42 to manage about 6.3 million gallons of oil…the Exxon Valdez carried a crew of 19 to transport 53 million gallons of oil,” the report explained.

Alaskan weather conditions — 33 degrees with a light rain — and the remote location added to the 1989 disaster, the report continues. With the captain not present, the third mate made a navigation error, according to another 1990 investigation by the National Transportation and Safety Board, Practices that relate to the Exxon Valdez.

“The third mate failed to properly maneuver the vessel, possibly due to fatigue or excessive workload,” the Safety Board concluded.

Containing Oil Spills

At the time, spill response capabilities to deal with the spreading oil were found to be unexpectedly slow and inadequate, according to the Oil Spill Commission.

“The worldwide capabilities of Exxon Corporation would mobilize huge quantities of equipment and personnel to respond to the spill — but not in the crucial first few hours and days when containment and cleanup efforts are at a premium,” the commission’s report explained.

At 987 feet long and 166 feet wide, the Exxon Valdez — delivered to Exxon in December 1986 — was the largest ship ever built on the West Coast.

The commission added that the U.S. Coast Guard “would demonstrate its prowess at ship salvage, protecting crews and lightering operations, but prove utterly incapable of oil spill containment and response.”

Spill Cleanup Lessons

Exxon began a cleanup effort that included thousands of Exxon and contractor personnel, according to ExxonMobil. More than 11,000 Alaska residents and volunteers rushed to the coastline to assist.

“Because Prince William Sound contained many rocky coves where the oil collected, the decision was made to displace it with high-pressure hot water,” noted a 2001 study for the American Academy of Underwater Sciences.

“However, this also displaced and destroyed the microbial populations on the shoreline; many of these organisms (e.g. plankton) are the basis of the coastal marine food chain, and others (e.g. certain bacteria and fungi) are capable of facilitating the biodegradation of oil,” explained scientific diving expert Stephen Jewett, professor emeritus of environmental studies at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

“At the time, both scientific advice and public pressure was to clean everything, but since then, a much greater understanding of natural and facilitated remediation processes has developed, due somewhat in part to the opportunity presented for study by the Exxon Valdez spill,” Jewett added.

His academic paper, “Scuba techniques used to assess the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill,” brought insights into mitigating the impact of the Alaskan oil spill — which had expedited passage of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration photo from 2014 study, “Twenty-Five Years After the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: NOAA’s Scientific Support, Monitoring, and Research.”

According to ExxonMobil, the company spent $4.3 billion as a result of the accident, “including compensatory payments, cleanup payments, settlements and fines. The company voluntarily compensated more than 11,000 Alaskans and businesses within a year of the spill.”

A separate study by the Alaska Oil Spill Commission resulted in the February 1990 report, “Details about the Accident.” Scientists monitoring effects of the grounding have reported the ecosystem of Prince William Sound continues to recover, but it is healthy.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2014 published the 78-page “Twenty-Five Years After the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: NOAA’s Scientific Support, Monitoring, and Research” further examining the response.

In California two decades before the Exxon Valdez, the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill from a Union Oil platform six miles off the coast led to the modern environmental movement — and establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) a year later. Learn more in Oil Seeps and Santa Barbara Spill.

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Recommended Reading:  The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Perspectives on Modern World History (2011); Slick Policy: Environmental and Science Policy in the Aftermath of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill (2018); Amazing Pipeline Stories: How Building the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Transformed Life in America’s Last Frontier (1997). 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 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: “Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/transportation/exxon-valdez-oil-spill. Last Updated: March 21, 2026. Original Published Date: March 24, 2009.

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In the early 19th century, lamp designs burned many different fuels, including rapeseed oil, lard, and whale oil rendered from whale blubber (and the more expensive spermaceti from the heads of sperm whales), but most Americans could only afford light emitted by animal-fat tallow candles.

By 1850, the U.S. Patent Office recorded almost 250 different patents for all manner of lamps, wicks, burners, and fuels to meet growing consumer demand for illumination. At the time, most Americans lived in almost complete darkness when the sun went down.

The Boston company of Rufus H. Spalding manufactured burning fluid and camphene as inexpensive illuminating fuels while promoting “portable and steady lamps of every description.”

Up to 1840, oil from whale blubber was the most popular lamp fuel. It was overtaken by less expensive lamp fuels that included lard oil and turpentine mixtures, as well as camphene, a term coined by Augustus Webb of New York in his 1838 patent for a lamp burning distilled spirits of turpentine.

Camphene, the distilled spirits of turpentine used as a lamp fuel, produced an inexpensive and bright light but required a chimney or draft system to adequately produce combustion without smoking. Henry Porter of Bangor, Maine, in 1835 patented his camphene mixture and opened a business to sell it in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. The concoction combined one part turpentine with four parts alcohol and a small amount of camphor for aroma.

“Porter’s Burning Fluid” became a popular lamp fuel. It burned brightly and smelled good, but could be dangerous, the Boston Mattapan Register reported, explaining that house fires and injuries were too common.

Many other burning fluid lamps were simple, requiring only a burner with a narrow tube or tubes to hold the wick — and no chimney, according to Charles Leib, publications chairman of The Rushlight Club, an international association of collectors and students of historic lighting.

The alcohol mixtures used, however, contained highly volatile vapors, Leib added, noting, “The burning fluid lamps were prone to mishandling, especially when filling, resulting in “flash fires” when escaping vapors from the burning fluid lamp came in contact with an existing flame or fire.”

Before kerosene, two-wicked “burning fluid” lamps were popular but sometimes dangerous sources of light.

The Boston newspaper noted on September 10, 1859:

There are different kinds of lamps and of lamp oil, adapted to different tastes and circumstances; and there is one at least, most abominable invention under the name of Camphene Oil, or Burning Fluid, which were better denominated a Swift and Ready Means of Destruction for Private Families; for this designation would convey a true idea of its nature and effects.

This was a common misstatement, putting together camphene and burning fluid as the same product, according to Leib. “During the popularity of burning fluid lamps in the 1850s, numerous patents for safety features were issued to solve these problems,” explained the 2011 author of “Did You Mean Camphene or Burning Fluid?” in The Bulletin (pages 28-37) of the Pewter Collectors’ Club of America. 

Despite the perceived risks, consumer demand for camphene and burning fluids grew. By 1856, Rufus H. Spalding had taken over Henry Porter’s Boston business as the “Sole Manufacturer of Porter’s Patent Composition.”

Camphene was spirits of turpentine. Burning fluids included various inflammable mixtures of which turpentine was only a part. Circa 1855 advertisements for “Original Porter’s Patent Burning Fluid, Superior Camphene & Alcohol” manufactured by Rufus H. Spalding.

Spalding offered many ornamental lighting devices, including girandoles and candelabra, along with lanterns and lamps for all kinds of fuels (also see Making a Two-Wick Camphene Lamp).

Spalding’s downtown Tremont Row offices and “manufactory” on Adams Street supplied camphene to Boston’s expanding population.

Whale Oil, Rock Oil, and Gaslight

The cost of whale oil ranged from $1.30 a gallon to $2.50 a gallon ($46.61 a gallon to $93.47 a gallon in 2024 dollars). Lard oil was about 90 cents a gallon. More popular was the manufactured “coal oil,” a fuel refined from coal that cost about 50 cents a gallon, but it was sooty and yielded a low-quality light.

Rock oil had been patented in 1854 by a Canadian physician and geologist, Abraham Gesner, who named his lamp fuel kerosene. Most people called it coal oil. A factory in Long Island, New York, soon began producing and selling Gesner’s new product.

In larger cities, public street gaslights already burned a “manufactured gas” made by distilling tar and wood. Baltimore, Maryland, lit the first U.S. public gas street lamp in 1817 at a ceremony one block from city hall.

In 1836, the newly formed Philadelphia Gas Works operated a “gasification” plant that manufactured illuminating gaslight from refined coal that was piped to 46 street lamps.

But for cheap, bright household lighting, many Americans still bought a two-wick lamp fueled with camphene. The unusual lamps had burners with long wick tubes set at angles to burn separately, a design many believed helped lower the risk of “flash fires.” Metal caps were placed over the tubes to extinguish the flames (considered safer than blowing them out).

Alcohol used in camphene was an important mainstay for distilleries, with many selling 30 percent to 80 percent of their output to the lamp fuel market. Taverns aside, by 1860 distilleries were delivering at least 90 million gallons of alcohol per year to the lighting industry.

Camphene and a variety of burning fluid production and distribution systems were well established and with whale oil becoming increasingly expensive, the future looked bright, despite the occasional flash fires. Then, on August 27, 1859, Edwin L. Drake drilled America’s first commercial oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

Investors in “Drake’s Folly,” including George Bissell of the Seneca Oil Company of New Haven, Connecticut, learned from a Yale professor that oil could be refined into kerosene. Simple distillation of oil yielded kerosene that sold for about 50 cents a gallon, about the same price as camphene. Pennsylvania refineries sprang up using basic “tea kettle” stills with 40 gallons to 4,000 gallons per day capacity.

As inexpensive oil-based kerosene began overwhelming makers of camphene (and coal oil) at the start of the Civil War, a tax on alcohol extinguished the camphene lighting business along with the other burning fluids.

Whale Oil Myth

To help fund the Union Army, the Internal Revenue Act imposed a $2.08 per gallon tax on alcohol between 1862 and 1864. Intended as an excise tax on beverage alcohol only, the law did not specifically exempt industrial uses, including camphene, which was about 75 percent high-proof alcohol.

The tax on the alcohol in camphene rose to as high as two dollars per gallon, according to The Whale Oil Myth. “Early petroleum derivatives suddenly enjoyed a huge government price advantage. And that advantage was over camphene. Whale oil no longer mattered.”

Kerosene brought inexpensive light, but it is a common misconception that oil “saved the whales.”

A February 2022 article in Environmental History noted, “the U.S. government created the oil industry with a federal tax on fuels that had already been in competition with whale oil, especially alcohol, which was a necessary ingredient in camphene and burning fluids.”

Camphene, once favored, was soon forgotten in American households (Congress repealed the alcohol tax in 1906).

Fueling the Future

Today the home of an oil museum and park, the Drake well yielded hundreds of gallons of high-quality crude oil. Each gallon could be distilled into about three quarts of lamp fuel. The new product became interchangeably known as rock oil, coal oil, carbon oil, or kerosene (the 19th-century product is still used as rocket fuel).

An ad seeking agents to sell the Aladdin brand of kerosene lamps, circa 1900.

Following Drake’s 1859 historic discovery, Samuel Kier of Pittsburgh was his first customer — and the first person in the United States to refine oil for lamp fuel. He sold his higher-quality “Carbon Oil” at $1.50 per gallon.

After a drilling slowdown during the Civil War, the first oil boom towns appeared in northwestern Pennsylvania. Barges began moving 42-gallon oil barrels down Oil Creek to the Allegheny River and onto newly built refineries in Pittsburgh. Wooden derricks appeared, many with two-wicked oilfield lanterns called yellow dogs fueled with crude oil.

Within a few years, kerosene lamps illuminated almost every American home. Many new exploration and production companies prospered thanks to kerosene. Then, beginning in the 1880s, kerosene for lamps started to become obsolete as a new technology entered the marketplace.

Thomas Edison’s electric lights steadily began to replace kerosene lamps. Almost as quickly as kerosene extinguished camphene 20 years before, electric lighting dimmed kerosene’s future as consumers switched on electric lights. The loss of its principal product could have doomed America’s young petroleum industry.

Then, another radical invention became incredibly popular with consumers, not for lighting, but for transportation. “Horseless carriages” with internal combustion engines fueled by a petroleum product provided a new opportunity for the oil business (see Cantankerous Combustion – 1st U.S. Auto Show).

With diminishing demand for kerosene, demand for gasoline transformed America’s oil exploration, production, and transportation companies. Consumer demand for a formerly discarded byproduct of kerosene distillation came at an especially good time for Texas wildcatters.

In 1901, the giant Spindletop Hill oilfield was discovered near Beaumont. The modern petroleum age arrived. 

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Recommended Reading:  Oil Lamps The Kerosene Era In North America (1978); Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry (2009). 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: “Camphene to Kerosene Lamps.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/products/camphene-to-kerosene-lamps. Last Updated: March 2, 2026. Original Published Date: April 29, 2017.

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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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A Vacuum Oil Company subsidiary in Cape Town, South Africa, trademarked a flying horse logo inspired by Pegasus of Greek mythology. Based in Rochester, New York, Vacuum Oil had built a successful lubricants business long before gasoline was a branded product.

When Vacuum Oil and Standard Oil of New York (Socony) combined in 1931, the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company adopted the winged horse trademark and marketed Pegasus Spirits and Mobilgas products.

The original Mobil Pegasus logo was registered in 1911 by the South African subsidiary of New York-based Vacuum Oil Co.

A stylized red gargoyle had advertised the company, which produced petroleum-based lubricants for carriages and steam engines. Created by the Vacuum Oil Company of South Africa, the Pegasus trademark proved to be a far more enduring image.

Learn more in Mobil’s High-Flying Trademark.

March 16, 1914 – “Main Street” Oil Well completed in Oklahoma

A well completed in 1914 produced oil from about 1,770 feet beneath Barnsdall, Oklahoma. The popular TV program Ripley’s Believe It or Not would proclaim the well the “World’s Only Main Street Oil Well.”

The “World’s Only Main Street Oil Well” in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, was visited in 2016 by American Oil & Gas Historical Society volunteer Tim Wells. Photo by Bruce Wells.

The town originally was called Bigheart, named for Osage Chief James Bigheart, who on behalf of the Osage people in 1875 signed the first lease for oil and gas exploration, according to Osage County. In 1922, Barnsdall was renamed for Theodore Barnsdall, owner of the Barnsdall Refining Company, which was later acquired by Baker Hughes. The “Barnsdall Main Street Oil Well” was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.

March 17, 1890 – Sun Oil Company founded

Established in 1886 by Joseph Pew and Edward Emerson to provide light and heat to Pittsburgh, the Peoples Natural Gas Company expanded into production, becoming the Sun Oil Company of Ohio. The new company acquired leases near Findlay and began “producing petroleum, rock and carbon oil, transporting and storing same; refining, purifying, manufacturing such oil and its various products.” 

Sun Oil Company marketed Sun Oils from 1894 to 1920 and its original Sunoco brand from 1920 to 1954.

Sun Oil Company went public in 1925, with its stock appearing for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange. Four years later, a partnership with downhole gyroscope inventor Elmer Sperry created Sperry-Sun Drilling Services. 

March 17, 1923 – Discovery leads to Seminole Oil Boom

The Betsy Foster No. 1 well, a 2,800-barrel-a-day oil gusher near Wewoka, county seat of Seminole County, Oklahoma, launched the Seminole area boom. The discovery south of Oklahoma City was followed by others in Cromwell and Bethel (1924) and Earlsboro and Seminole (1926). Thirty-nine separate oilfields would be found in Seminole and Pottawatomie, Okfuskee, Hughes, and Pontotoc counties. Once among the poorest regions in Oklahoma, by 1935 the greater Seminole area became the largest supplier of oil in the world.

Learn more in Seminole Oil Boom.

March 17, 1949 – First Commercial Application of Hydraulic Fracturing

A team from Halliburton and Stanolind companies converged on an oil well about 12 miles east of Duncan, Oklahoma, and performed the first commercial application of hydraulic fracturing.

A 1947 experimental well had fractured a natural gas field in Hugoton, Kansas, and proven the possibility of increased productivity. The technique was developed and patented by Stanolind (later known as Pan American Oil Company), and an exclusive license was issued to Halliburton Company to perform the process. Four years later, the license was extended to all qualified oilfield service companies.

The world’s first commercial hydraulic fracturing job (above) occurred on March 17, 1949, about 12 miles east of Duncan, Oklahoma. Photo courtesy Halliburton.

“Since that fateful day in 1949, hydraulic fracturing has done more to increase recoverable reserves than any other technique,” proclaimed a Halliburton company spokesman in 2009, adding that more than two million fracturing treatments have been pumped without polluting an aquifer.

Erle P. Halliburton patented an efficient well-cementing technology in 1921 that improved oil production while protecting the environment. The earliest attempts to increase petroleum production by fracturing geologic formations began in the 1860s.

Learn more in Shooters – A ‘Fracking’ History. 

March 17, 1949 – “Diamond Glenn” opens Shamrock Hotel

Texas independent producer “Diamond Glenn” McCarthy hosted the grand opening of his $21 million, 18-story, 1,100-room Shamrock Hotel on the outskirts of Houston. McCarthy reportedly spent another $1 million for the hotel’s St. Patrick’s Day opening day gala, including arranging for a 16-car Santa Fe Super Chief train to bring friends from Hollywood.

Glenn McCarthy spent $21 million to construct his 1,100-room Shamrock Hotel — and another $1 million for its St. Patrick’s Day opening gala. From 1949 to 1954, “Saturday at the Shamrock” was the only regularly scheduled national radio show to broadcast from Texas.

The Texas wildcatter, who had discovered 11 oilfields by 1945, also introduced his own label of bourbon at Shamrock, the largest hotel in the United States at the time. Dubbed Houston’s biggest party, the Shamrock’s debut “made the city of Houston a star overnight,” one newspaper reported.

Learn more in “Diamond Glenn” McCarthy.

March 18, 1937 – New London School Explosion Tragedy

With just minutes left in the school day, a natural gas explosion destroyed the New London High School in Rusk County, Texas. Odorless gas (a residual natural gas called casing-head gas) had leaked into the basement and ignited with an explosion heard four miles away. East Texas oilfield workers — many with children attending the school — rushed to the scene, as did a cub reporter from Dallas, Walter Cronkite.

Roughnecks from the East Texas oilfield rushed to the devastated school and searched for survivors throughout the night. Photo courtesy New London Museum.

Despite desperate rescue efforts, 298 people were killed that day (dozens more later died of injuries). The explosion’s source was later found to be an electric wood-shop sander that sparked odorless gas that had pooled beneath and in the walls of the school. As a result of this disaster, Texas and other states passed laws requiring that natural gas be mixed with a malodorant to give early warning of a gas leak.

Learn more about the tragedy in New London School Explosion.

March 18, 1938 — First Offshore Well drilled off Louisiana

Oil production from a well drilled by Pure Oil and Superior Oil companies helped launch the modern offshore industry. The Creole oilfield in Louisiana’s offshore Cameron Parish was the first discovered in the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico, according to the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR). “A look back at both the Creole platform and others that followed after World War II provides a glimpse of history in the making,” noted Offshore magazine in 2014.

More offshore wells followed, including the Kerr-McGee drilling platform, Kermac Rig No. 16, which in 1947 became the first offshore rig out of sight of land. By the end of 1949, offshore exploration had discovered 11 oil and natural gas fields. 

Learn more in Offshore Oil History.

March 20, 1919 – American Petroleum Institute founded

Tracing its roots to World War I when the petroleum industry and Congress worked together to fuel the war effort, the American Petroleum Institute (API) was founded in New York City. Within two years, the organization had improved an 1876 French scale to measure petroleum density relative to water — a standard later adopted and called API gravity. Based in Washington, D.C., since 1969, API has lobbied on behalf of major oil and natural gas companies while maintaining standards and recommended industry practices.

March 20, 1973 – Pennsylvania Boom Town recognized as Historic

The once-famous oil boom town of Pithole, Pennsylvania, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. An 1865 oilfield discovery at Pithole Creek launched a drilling boom for the early U.S. petroleum industry, which had begun six years earlier in nearby Titusville. The Pithole field’s production would lead to the construction of the nation’s first oil pipeline, but the boom ended after about 500 days.

Learn more in Oil Boom at Pithole Creek.

March 21, 1881 – Earth Scientist becomes USGS Director 

President James Garfield appointed John Wesley Powell director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), a scientific agency established two years earlier. Powell, who led USGS for the next decade, laid the foundation for modern earth science research.

John Wesley Powell at his desk in Washington, D.C., in 1896. Photo courtesy Smithsonian Institution.

Born in 1834 at Mount Morris, New York, Powell was a Union officer during the Civil War, where he lost an arm at the Battle of Shiloh. After the war, he became a respected geologist and expedition leader, organized early surveys in the West, and helped establish USGS in 1879.

Powell advocated the national mapping standards and geodetic system still in use today. In 1884, Powell testified to Congress, “A government cannot do any scientific work of more value to the people at large than by causing the construction of proper topographic maps of the country.”

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Recommended Reading: Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum (1975); Oil in Oklahoma (1976); A History of the Greater Seminole Oil Field (1981); The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters (2014).; The Green and the Black: The Complete Story of the Shale Revolution, the Fight over Fracking, and the Future of Energy (2016); Corduroy Road: The story of Glenn H. McCarthy (1951); A Texas Tragedy: The New London School Explosion (2012); Offshore Pioneers: Brown & Root and the History of Offshore Oil and Gas (2011); Cherry Run Valley: Plumer, Pithole, and Oil City, Pennsylvania, Images of America (2000); The Powell Expedition: New Discoveries about John Wesley Powell’s 1869 River Journey (2017). 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, This Week in Oil and Gas History News, and help expand historical research. Contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.

The post This Week in Petroleum History: March 16 – 22 appeared first on American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

Ever since the earliest U.S. oil discoveries, detonating dynamite or nitroglycerin downhole helped increase a well’s production. The geologic “fracking” technology commonly used in oilfields after the Civil War would be significantly enhanced when hydraulic fracturing arrived in 1949. 

Modern hydraulic fracturing — popularly known as petroleum well “fracking” — can trace its roots to April 1865, when Civil War Union veteran Lt. Col. Edward A. L. Roberts received the first of his many patents for an “exploding torpedo.”

In May 1990, Pennsylvania’s Otto Cupler Torpedo Company “shot” its last oil well with liquid nitroglycerin as the company abandoned using nitro while continuing to pursue a fundamental oilfield technology. Company President Rick Tallini credited Col. Roberts’ original patents for leading to modern fracturing systems.

As a Union Lieutenant Colonel in December 1862, E.A.L. Roberts “conceived the idea of opening the veins and crevices in oil-bearing rock by exploding an elongated shell or torpedo therein.” Images courtesy Drake Well Museum, Early Days of Oil, Princeton University Press.

When the Roberts patent expired in 1883, his company was sold to former employee Adam Cupler Jr., who died in a 1903 nitro explosion. The Cupler Torpedo Company became the Otto Cupler Torpedo Company in 1937 after Otto Torpedo Company purchased it.

“Our business since Colonel Roberts’ day has concerned lowering high explosives charges into oil wells in the Appalachian area to blast fractures into the oil-bearing sand,” Tallini said, adding that Col. Roberts’ torpedo company operated in the Allegheny region of Titusville — where the U.S. petroleum industry began in August 1859 with the first American well specifically drilled for oil.

The Civil War veteran’s explosive method for fracking wells in oil-bearing geologic formations would be adopted throughout the Pennsylvania oil regions (sometimes illegally) and in other states making their first oil discoveries.

Civil War Veteran’s Torpedo Company

Civil War veteran Col. Edward E.A.L. Roberts led a New Jersey regiment at the bloody 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Amid the chaos of the battle, he saw the results of explosive Confederate artillery rounds plunging into the narrow millrace (canal) that obstructed the battlefield.

When Col. E.A.L. Roberts founded his oil well service company in 1865, his many patents gave him a monopoly on torpedoes for downhole fracturing.

Despite heroic actions during the battle, he was cashiered from the Union Army in 1863. But the Virginia battlefield observation inspired the idea that would evolve into what he described as “superincumbent fluid tamping.”

Roberts received his first patent for an “Improvement in Exploding Torpedoes in Artesian Wells” on April 25, 1865. His oilfield invention of fracturing to improve a well would vastly improve oil production from America’s young petroleum industry. Many more of the technology patents would follow.

The Roberts torpedo system eclipsed earlier oilfield methods, including black powder or dropping sticks of dynamite down a well, which often collapsed boreholes and ruined production. The same month Roberts received his first exploding torpedo patent, a stage actor failed in a well dynamiting attempt.

In June 1864, John Wilkes Booth left Pennsylvania’s oilfields after a botched fracturing attempt at an oil well drilled by his Dramatic Oil Company.

Tamped with water, early torpedoes were set off by “go devils,” a weight dropped along a suspension wire.

Roberts received another U.S. Patent (No. 59,936) in November 1866. This improved device would become widely known as the Roberts Torpedo.

By filling the borehole with water before detonating his torpedo, Roberts greatly advanced the U.S. oil industry’s production technology. The column of water above the explosive device more effectively shattered rock formations at the oil-producing depths of wells.

“Shooting” Oil Wells

The Titusville Morning Herald newspaper reported, Our attention has been called to a series of experiments that have been made in the wells of various localities by Col. Roberts, with his newly patented torpedo. The results have in many cases been astonishing.

The torpedo, which is an iron case containing an amount of powder varying from fifteen to twenty pounds, is lowered into the well, down to the spot, as near as can be ascertained, where it is necessary to explode it.  It is then exploded by means of a cap on the torpedo, connected with the top of the shell by a wire.

Filling the borehole with water provided Roberts with the important “fluid tamping” to concentrate the concussion and more efficiently fracture surrounding oil strata.

The new downhole technology had an immediate impact — petroleum production from some wells increased 1,200 percent within a week of being shot — and the Roberts Petroleum Torpedo Company flourished thanks to the inventor’s exclusive patent.

Roberts charged $100 to $200 per torpedo and a royalty of one-fifteenth of the increased flow of oil. Attempting to avoid Roberts’ fees, some oilmen hired unlicensed practitioners who operated by “moonlight” with their own devices. The inventor was outraged.

Roberts hired Pinkerton detectives and lawyers to protect his patent — and is said to have been responsible for more civil litigation in defense of a patent than anyone in U.S. history. The inventor spent years and more than $250,000 to stop the unlawful “torpedoists” or “moonlighters.”

Pouring nitroglycerin into a canister prior to the “shooting” of a well drilled using a cable-tool rig.

Applied legally or illegally, by 1868, nitroglycerin was preferred to black powder, despite its frequently fatal tendency to detonate accidentally.

“A flame or a spark would not explode Nitro-Glycerin readily, but the chap who struck it a hard rap might as well avoid trouble among his heirs by having had his will written and a cigar-box ordered to hold such fragments as his weeping relatives could pick from the surrounding district,” noted John J. McLauren in 1896 in his book Sketches in Crude Oil — Some Accidents and Incidents of the Petroleum Development in all parts of the Globe.

Pouring nitroglycerin was risky enough; doing it for an illegal well “shooting” led to the term “moonlighting.”

Roberts died a wealthy man on March 25, 1881, in Titusville. His heirs sold Roberts Petroleum Torpedo Company to its employees, who continued in business as the Independent Explosives Company. By then, the Civil War Union veteran’s revolutionary “fracking” technology was being applied by the petroleum industry worldwide. 

Otto Cupler Torpedo Company

Rick Tallini’s historic Otto Cupler Torpedo Company at one time produced its own nitroglycerin in plants near Titusville — until the last of the company’s plants exploded in 1978. They continued using liquid nitroglycerin for more than a decade. Then the company’s final nitroglycerine supplier’s plant exploded in Moosic, Pennsylvania, in 1990.

A century earlier, farther east of the oilfields at Oil City and Titusville (and the notorious boom town of Pithole), the giant Bradford oilfield had its own nitroglycerine manufacturers and fracturing service companies. A notable fracturing operation there was run by an astute businesswoman (see Mrs. Alford’s Nitro Factory).

A 1948 Dodge Power Wagon on loan to the Drake Well Museum until 2022 once hauled hundreds of pounds of liquid nitroglycerin in ten-quart copper cans. In 1990, the Department of Transportation ended the hauling liquid nitroglycerin over roadways. Photo by Bruce Wells.

Tallini’s final well shooting on May 5, 1990, used up the last of his company’s liquid nitro reserves of nitroglycerine. His company would continue shooting wells, but with safer, modern explosives and procedures. The Otto Cupler Company preserved many documents from its earliest downhole detonations.

In 2024, E&K Equipment of Titusville donated its Otto-Cupler Torpedo Company nitro truck to the Drake Well Museum and Park in Titusville. The 1978 Chevrolet K20 3/4 ton truck display will replace an Otto Cupler 1948 Dodge on loan for display loaned from 2008 to 2022. The museum continues to host popular “Nitro Shows” for school groups.

Indian Territory Well

At the end of the 19th century in Indian Territory, a crowd gathered outside Bartlesville to watch a well fracturing. A Delaware Indian — the driller’s stepdaughter — dropped a weighted device known as a “Go Devil” down a wireline. Its impact set off the well’s canister of nitroglycerin.

The 1897 nitro-fracturing of the Nellie Johnstone No. 1 well resulted in a geyser of “black gold” that launched Oklahoma’s petroleum industry a decade before statehood (see First Oklahoma Oil Well).

Another oilfield innovation was firing bullets at several levels through a borehole’s casing to enhance the flow of oil from producing geologic formations.

Ira McCullough, a veteran of Los Angeles oilfields, in 1939 received a U.S. patent for his design of a multiple-bullet-shot perforator using “projectiles or perforating elements” that are shot through casing into the formation (see Downhole Bazooka). 

Hydraulic “Fracking”

On March 17, 1949, a team of petroleum production experts converged on an oil well about 12 miles east of Duncan, Oklahoma, to perform the first commercial application of hydraulic fracturing. Later that day, Halliburton and Stanolind company personnel successfully fractured another oil well near Holliday, Texas.

The first commercial hydraulic fracturing of an oil well on March 17, 1949, east of Duncan, Okla.

A fracking well experiment two years earlier in Hugoton, Kansas — home of a massive natural gas field — had proven the possibility of hydraulic fracturing for increased gas well productivity. Erle Halliburton (1892-1957) patented an improved method for cementing oil wells in 1921, two years after founding his well service company in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

By 1988, the technology will have been applied nearly one million times. The technique had been developed and patented by Stanolind (later known as the Pan American Oil Company), and an exclusive license was issued to Halliburton to perform the process. The license was extended to all qualified service companies in 1953.

To complete a well, a wireline lowers explosive charges to perforate the steel casing, cement, and oil-bearing formations. After the charges are electronically fired, hydraulic fracturing begins.

According to a spokesman from Pinnacle, a Halliburton service company:

Since that fateful day in 1949, hydraulic fracturing has done more to increase recoverable reserves than any other technique, and Halliburton has led the industry in developing and applying fracturing technology.

The company representative also noted, “In the more than 60 years following those first treatments, more than two million fracturing treatments have been pumped with no documented case of any treatment polluting an aquifer — not one.”

An Erle Halliburton statue was dedicated in 1993 in Duncan, Oklahoma.

Issues concerning water withdrawals for hydraulic fracturing, spills during the handling of fracturing fluids, and injection of the fluids with inadequate mechanical integrity were among issues raised by the Environmental Protection Agency in its 2016 report, Hydraulic Fracturing For Oil And Gas.

American Shale Revolution 

In the 1980s, a sudden technological advance in fracturing shale formations led to the United States vastly increasing its oil and especially natural gas production. The nation became the world’s top producer of natural gas in 2009 and the top oil producer in 2018. 

Although credit should be shared with others, America’s first “shale boom” began with the innovative thinking of independent producers, especially a Texan from Galveston, George P. Mitchell (1919 – 2013). Shale fracturing advancements began with steering a well horizontally into petroleum-producing geological formations.

In the 1980s, Mitchell Energy & Development began experimenting with hydraulic fracturing in horizontal wells in the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth. The company was among the few that began finding ways to extract large amounts of natural gas from shale formations.

Natural Gas

On March 6, 1981, Mitchell Energy drilled its C.W. Slay No. 1 well, the first commercial natural gas well of the Barnett shale formation. Over the next four years, the vertical well produced nearly a billion cubic feet of gas, but it would take almost two decades to perfect cost-effective shale fracturing methods — and combine them with horizontal drilling.

The 7,500-foot-deep Wise County well and others that followed in North Texas helped evaluate seismic and fracturing data to understand deep shale structures.

“The C.W. Slay No. 1 and the subsequent wells drilled into the Barnett formation laid the foundation for the shale revolution, proving that natural gas could be extracted from the dense, black rock thousands of feet underground,” the Dallas Morning News later declared.

More innovations came as geologists recognized the potential of natural gas-rich shales in Arkansas (Fayetteville formation) and in Pennsylvania and nearby states (the Marcellus). In the Williston Basin of North Dakota, producing oil since 1951, billions of barrels of new production came from the Bakken shale (see First North Dakota Oil Well).

America’ shale revolution would end decades of dependence on foreign oil and natural gas supplies.

America’s modern shale boom began in the 1980s when independent producers like George Mitchell experimented with ways to produce natural gas from the Barnett shale in Texas. May 2011 map courtesy Energy Information Administration.

By the end of 2012, with almost 14,000 wells drilled in the Barnett shale — the largest gas field in Texas — production began to decline, but the field still accounted for 6.1 percent of Texas natural gas production, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Injected Wastewater and Earthquakes

The largest earthquake in Oklahoma known to be induced by a process related to hydraulic fracturing came in 2019, according to the United States Geological Survey. USGS studies confirmed the majority of the state’s earthquakes for the previous decade resulted from injected wastewater methods — not well fracturing fluids. 

“Wastewater disposal is a ​separate ​process in which fluid waste from oil and gas production is injected deep underground, far below groundwater or drinking water aquifers,” USGS explained. “In Oklahoma over 90 percent of the wastewater that is injected is a byproduct of oil extraction process and not waste frack fluid.”

In the Permian Basin of West Texas, a major U.S. location of production from shale fields, the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) in September 2021 reported six earthquakes since February 2020 registered at least a 3.5 magnitude on the Richter scale. The RRC identified the disposal of the large amounts of water used to break apart rock formations as a likely contributor to seismic activity.

The commission “asked drillers to cut back on the amount of wastewater they’re pumping underground,” according to World Oil. “It’s a fairly unusual move by the regulator, which hasn’t been as active as its counterpart in Oklahoma in trying to prevent earthquakes linked to fracking.”

Petroleum Industry Perspective

Petroleum industry trade groups have established websites to educate a skeptical public about geologic fracturing technologies — “fracking” wells. According to one, “There is no shortage of questions about domestic energy production — what technologies are used? What does it mean for our environment? How does it create jobs? What is hydraulic fracturing, anyway?”

Hydraulic fracturing has increased production on millions of oil and natural gas wells since 1949.

To address public concerns, Energy in Depth — using research from the industry’s long history of well fracturing — has noted: “While the first commercial fracturing job was conducted in the 1940s, the technique has been applied to the vast majority of U.S. oil and natural gas wells to enhance well performance, minimize drilling, and recover otherwise inaccessible resources.”

The Energy In Depth website, a project of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), has reported that 90 percent of operating U.S. wells have been fractured, “and the process continues to be applied to boost production in unconventional formations — such as tight gas sands and shale deposits.”

For another perspective about downhole explosives to increase production, see Project Gasbuggy tests Nuclear “Fracking.”

Roberts at Battle of Fredericksburg

Some Civil War historians might know of Col. Edward A. L. Roberts leading one of the many ill-fated Union charges up Marye’s Heights. Below is American Oil & Gas Historical Society research documenting little-known details from his service records at the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Oil well “shooting” or “fracking” torpedo inventor Col. Edward A.L. Roberts (1829-1881) was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery at Titusville, Pennsylvania. A simple headstone includes only his name and the military rank he held at the Battle of Fredericksburg 19 years earlier.

An 1888 lithograph depicts the Army of the Potomac crossing the Rappahannock under fire in December 1862. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

For four months during the Civil War, the man who would someday revolutionize oil and natural gas production technology served as Lt. Colonel with the 28th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment. He fought at Fredericksburg in December 1862 – while awaiting results from his court martial, which had convened just weeks earlier.

As the military court deliberated specifications of “intoxication on dress parade,” Col. Roberts’ regiment marched into battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia. On December 13, the 28th New Jersey was the center of Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s first doomed assault on the fiercely defended Marye’s Heights. Fourteen more failed assaults would follow.

Col. Edward Roberts is buried in Titusville, Pa., where the U.S. oil industry began in 1859.

The 28th charged into carefully positioned cannons. Confederate Col. Edward Porter Alexander had declared: “A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it.”

Alexander was right. No Union soldiers would reach Marye’s Heights that day. Union casualties exceeded 12,000. When his commander was shot in the face during the 28th’s charge, Col. Roberts assumed command. One Union officer wrote, “We went into action under a most galling and deadly fire of shot and shell, and continued in action until near dark. Officers and men conducted themselves well.”

A month later, Col. Roberts’ court martial verdict was published under General Order No. 2. Despite his heroic actions during the battle, among the Civil War’s bloodiest, he was found guilty and ordered to be cashiered, effective January 12, 1863.

Prior to the court’s verdict, Col. Roberts had attempted to resign, but a superior officer characterized this as “tendering resignation in face of enemy.” Col. Roberts’ service as a Union officer ended in 1863. He soon would be transforming the Pennsylvania oilfields — and America’s petroleum industry.

Moonlighters shoot Wells

Andrew Dalrymple secretly shot his last well on February 5, 1873, when he and his wife were killed in a nitroglycerin explosion at Dennis Run, Pennsylvania. He allegedly had been “moonlighting” — illegal oil well shooting — in the Tidioute oilfield.

A Pennsylvania historical marker notes the 1865 demonstration of Col. E.A.L. Roberts’ invention.

Nitroglycerine was a powerful but dangerous means of fracturing oil-producing rock formations. The technology had been patented, its use rigorously protected. Pouring nitroglycerin was risky enough in the late 19th century. Doing it illegally at night made it more so.

“The Dalrymple torpedo accident at Tidioute brings to light the fact that nitroglycerine, or other dangerous explosives, are used, stored and manipulated secretly in places little suspected by the general public,” reported the Titusville Morning Herald.

“A large amount of this dangerous material has lately been stolen from the various magazines throughout the country, ” the newspaper added. “This species of theft is winked at by some parties, who are opposed to the Roberts torpedo patent.”

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Recommended Reading: The Green and the Black: The Complete Story of the Shale Revolution, the Fight over Fracking, and the Future of Energy (2016); The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World (2015); The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters  (2014); The Extraction State, A History of Natural Gas in America (2021). 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: “Shooters – A “Fracking” History.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/hydraulic-fracturing. Last Updated: March 11, 2026. Original Published Date: September 1, 2007.

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At 3:17 p.m. on March 18, 1937, with just minutes left in the school day and more than 500 students and teachers inside the building, a massive explosion leveled most of what had been the wealthiest rural school in the nation.

Hundreds died at New London High School in Rusk County after odorless natural gas leaked into the basement and ignited. The sound of the explosion was heard four miles away. Parents, many of them roughnecks from the East Texas oilfield, rushed to the school.

Despite immediate rescue efforts, 298 died, most from grades 5 to 11 (dozens more later died of injuries). After an investigation, the cause of the school explosion was found to be an electric wood-shop sander that sparked the residue gas vapors (also called casinghead gas) that had pooled beneath and inside the walls of the school.

Roughnecks from the East Texas oilfield rushed to the New London school after the March 18, 1937, explosion — and searched for survivors throughout the night. Photo courtesy New London Museum.

“The school was newly built in the 1930s for close to $1 million and, from its inception, bought natural gas from Union Gas to supply its energy needs,” noted History.com. “The school’s natural gas bill averaged about $300 a month.”

In early 1937, the school board canceled its contract with Union Gas to save money and tapped into a pipeline of casinghead gas from Parade Gasoline Company, according to historian James Cornell.

“This practice — while not explicitly authorized by local oil companies — was widespread in the area,” he reported in The Great International Disaster Book. “The natural gas extracted with the oil was considered a waste product and was flared off.”

Natural gas produced from the top of an oil well — the casinghead — contains either dissolved or associated gas or both. The residue gas collects in the annular space between the casing and tubing in the oil well before separating during or shortly after production and is flared for safety.

In the early 20th century, processing plants began turning oilfield-associated gas into a lower quality but inexpensive gasoline of between 40 octane and 60 octane. The product was called white gas, condensation gasoline, and natural gasoline.

The East Texas explosion made headlines from the Alaska Territory to Washington, D.C., where President Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisted the Red Cross and federal agencies to send assistance. Image from The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., March 19, 1937.

By 1920, Oklahoma had 315 casinghead gas plants in operation, including the first built west of the Mississippi River (see Casinghead Gasoline at Glenn Pool). But the hazards of vapors from casinghead gas had been exposed on September 27, 1915, when a railroad car carrying casinghead gasoline exploded in downtown Ardmore, killing 43 people and injuring others.

Cronkite reaches the Scene

A young journalist working for United Press in Dallas, Walter Cronkite, was among the first reporters to reach the scene of the disaster south of Kilgore, between Tyler and Longview. It was dark and raining in East Texas.

“He got his first inkling of how bad the incident was when he saw a large number of cars lined up outside the funeral home in Tyler,” noted a local historian. Floodlights cast long shadows at the site of the disaster.

“We hurried on to New London,” Cronkite wrote in his book, A Reporter’s Life. “We reached it just at dusk. Huge floodlights from the oilfields illuminated a great pile of rubble at which men and women tore with their bare hands. Many were workers from the oilfields.”

The March 18, 1937, explosion hurled a concrete slab 200 feet onto a Chevrolet. Students had been preparing for the next day’s interscholastic meet in Henderson. Photos courtesy New London Museum.

Decades later, the retired CBS Evening News anchor added, “I did nothing in my studies nor in my life to prepare me for a story of the magnitude of that New London tragedy, nor has any story since that awful day equaled it.”

A Bad Decision

David M. Brown, who researched the tragedy for a 2012 book, described the “sad irony” of how the East Texas oil boom financed building the wealthiest rural school in the nation in 1934 — and the faulty heating system that permitted raw gas to accumulate beneath it.

According to Brown, the explosion was partly the result of school officials making a bad decision.

To save money on heating the school building, the trustees had authorized workers to tap into a pipeline carrying “waste” natural gas produced by a gasoline refinery. The resulting explosion laid waste to a town’s future, Brown concluded in his book Gone at 3:17, the Untold Story of the Worst School Disaster in American History. 

Opened in 1995 across the site of the original school, the New London Museum began in 1980 when a new generation of students started asking survivor Mollie Ward what she remembered.

Following the disaster, a temporary morgue was set up near the school as well as nearby Overton and Henderson, according to Robert Hilliard, a volunteer for the New London Museum.

“Many burials were made in the local Pleasant Hill cemetery that to this day, still symbolize the great loss that families endured,” added Hilliard, among those who have maintained the museum’s website. “Many of the grave sites display porcelain pictures of the victims,” he said. “Marbles that were once played with were pushed into the cement border outlining the graves.”

Making Natural Gas Safer

As a result of the disaster, Texas was the first state to pass laws requiring that natural gas be mixed with a “malodorant” to give early warning of a gas leak. Other states quickly followed. The now-mandated rotten-egg smell associated with natural gas is mercaptan, the odorant added to indicate the potentially dangerous leaking of gas.

The New London School campus for grades 5 through 11 “was a new showplace in 1937, the product of new oil wealth that could not have been imagined 10 years earlier.”

New London’s community museum, across the highway from the school site, began in 1992 thanks to years of work by its founder and first curator, Mollie Ward, who was 10 when she survived the devastating explosion. She said in a 2001 interview that among the museum’s exhibits was a blackboard found in the rubble.

“Sometime in the night a worker found a blackboard that had been on the wall that read ‘Oil and natural gas are East Texas’ greatest mineral blessing,'” said Ward, who spent years helping start a former students association that reunited survivors of the New London explosion.

One museum exhibit is a recovered blackboard that reads, “Oil and natural gas are East Texas’ greatest mineral blessing.” Photo by Bruce Wells.

Near the museum is a 32-foot-high granite cenotaph dedicated in 1939. In December 1938, a contract for building a monument was awarded to the Premier Granite Quarries of Llano, Texas, with Donald Nelson of Dallas supervising architect.

After a competition between seven Texas sculptors who submitted preliminary designs, Herring Coe of Beaumont created the model for the sculptural block at the cenotaph’s top.

Near the New London museum stands a 32-foot granite cenotaph dedicated in 1939. Life-size figures represent children coming to school, bringing gifts and handing in homework.

The 20-ton sculptured block of Texas granite — supported by two monolithic granite columns — depicts 12 life-size figures to represent children coming to school, bringing gifts and handing in homework to two teachers.

The March 18, 1937, East Texas tragedy and those who died are remembered at the New London Museum. In 1977, Wayne Shaffer, an elementary student at the time of the explosion, helped organize memorials that have become reunions for all New London/West Rusk High graduates.

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Recommended Reading: Gone at 3:17, the Untold Story of the Worst School Disaster in American History (2012); A Texas Tragedy: The New London School Explosion (2012); The Great International Disaster Book (1976); A Reporter’s Life (1997). 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: “New London School Explosion.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/oil-almanac/new-london-texas-school-explosion. Last Updated: March 10, 2025. Original Published Date: March 11, 2011.

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The Mobil Oil Pegasus perched atop the Magnolia Petroleum building in Dallas from 1934 until 1999, when rust and growing structural issues forced its removal. On the first day of 2000, a carefully crafted duplicate returned to the Dallas skyline.

Thanks to its widespread popularity, Mobil Oil’s high-flying trademark returned to its Texas home with one red Pegasus on each side of a sign painstakingly recreated by the American Porcelain Enamel Company. As the year 1999 drew to a close, the duplicated Pegasus soared again.

The “Flying Red Horse” trademark of Magnolia Petroleum landed on the company’s Dallas headquarters in 1934, in time for the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute (API).

A Dallas hotel would later restore the original Mobil Oil Pegasus after finding its rusted remains in a city-owned shed. The Omni Dallas Hotel funded the restoration, and in 2015 the surviving red neon-edged symbol — a one-sided version — was re-lit in front of the Omni on Lamar Street.

The Mobil Oil (now ExxonMobil) trademark has been a feature of Dallas since first welcoming attendees to a 1934 convention of petroleum company executives. The Magnolia building’s Pegasus has remained one of the most recognizable corporate symbols in American history —  and a marketing icon rivaling the Sinclair dinosaur.

Magnolia Petroleum

When the 400-foot-tall Magnolia Petroleum building opened in 1922, it was the city’s first skyscraper — and tallest building west of the Mississippi River. With 29 floors and seven elevators, the Magnolia building towered over its Beaux-Arts neighbor, the Adolphus Hotel, built in 1913.

The Magnolia building’s multi-million dollar construction featured a “modified classical design” by a famed architect from the United Kingdom. The Texas Historical Commission in 1978 placed a marker at Commerce and Akard streets in Dallas that reads:

Erected in 1921-22, this building housed the offices of Magnolia Petroleum Co., later Mobil Oil Co. It was designed by Sir Alfred C. Bossom (1881-1965), noted British architect, and built at a cost of $4 million. The tallest structure in Dallas for almost 20 years, it reflected the city’s increasing economic importance. In 1934 a revolving neon sign was placed atop the building. The “Flying Red Horse,” trademark for Magnolia products, quickly became a local landmark.

Vacuum Oil Company trademarked the Pegasus logo in 1911 and by the 1930s was marketing Pegasus Motor Spirits and Mobiloil. The Magnolia Petroleum building, completed in 1922, was “a great peg driven into the ground holding Dallas in its place.”

The Magnolia building also was among the first high-rises to have air conditioning when it opened in 1922, according to the management company that acquired it in 1997. A fully restored lobby features a gold leaf decorative plaster and original elevator doors engraved with the Pegasus logo.

Much of the original architecture’s classical design has been restored, according to the Magnolia Dallas Downtown — a boutique hotel blending the historic building’s past with modern amenities.

An 11-foot Mobil Oil Pegasus displayed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair found its way to a Mobil service station in Casa Linda, Texas, and later to a Dallas County museum.

After the Magnolia building’s 1922 opening, a local reporter described the oil company headquarters building as “a great peg driven into the ground holding Dallas in its place.”

A circa 1935 Dallas skyline postcard given to visitors to the observatory tower in the Magnolia Building. Image courtesy DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, digital collection.

When Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony) acquired the Magnolia Petroleum Company in 1925, the building was part of the deal. Nine years later, the two-sided Pegasus sign would land on its roof.

Pegasus takes Flight

The Mobil Oil Pegasus began its journey in 1911, when a Vacuum Oil Company subsidiary in Cape Town, South Africa, first trademarked the Pegasus logo. Based in Rochester, New York, Vacuum Oil had built a successful petroleum lubricants business around an 1869 patent by its founder, Hiram Everest, long before gasoline was even a branded product.

Vacuum Oil Company’s products used a gargoyle prior to adopting the winged horse of mythology.

At first, a stylized red gargoyle advertised the company, which produced early petroleum-based lubricants for horse-drawn carriages and steam engines. The Pegasus trademark proved to be a more enduring image. In Greek mythology, Pegasus — a winged horse — carried thunderbolts for Zeus.

By 1931, growth of the automobile industry expanded the Vacuum Oil product lineup to include Pegasus Spirits and Mobilgas — later simplified to Mobil. When Standard Oil of New York and Vacuum Oil combined to form Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, the new company adopted the familiar winged trademark, as did an affiliate, Magnolia Petroleum.

The certificate from Cape Town, South Africa, notes that the “Vacuum Oil Company of South Africa Limited” is named “as proprietor of the Trade Mark represented above.” Image courtesy ExxonMobil Historical Collection/Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin.

It took a year to build the rotating 35-foot by 40-foot Pegasus sign, which beamed a red neon glow in 1934 to welcome the annual meeting to be held in Dallas by the American Petroleum Institute (API). For decades the emblem slowly rotated above the growing city as corporate consolidations and mergers changed Socony-Vacuum ownership.

In 1955, the name of the company changed to Socony Mobil Oil; in 1966, it became just Mobil Oil. A neon Mobil Oil Pegasus displayed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair found its way to a Mobil gas station in Casa Linda, Texas, and later to the Old Red Museum of Dallas County History & Culture.

The Old Red Museum was closed by 2024, when its historic building — the original Dallas County Courthouse — became home to the Texas Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

A New Pegasus

In 1974 the rotating red sign’s motor ground to a halt, and Mobil Oil moved out of the Magnolia building three years later. The company sold its aging skyscraper and the glowing but unmoving sign to the city of Dallas. Twenty years later, Pegasus’ neon lights finally went out.

In the late 1990s, when a Denver-based developer transformed the deteriorating Magnolia building into a luxurious 330-room hotel, a dedicated group of patrons and corporate partners joined in to bring the rusting Pegasus sign back to life.

With a fundraising effort that raised more than $600,000, the Project Pegasus team targeted New Year’s Eve of 1999 to reintroduce Dallas citizens to their petroleum heritage landmark. Restoration of the 8,000-pound sign proved challenging.

The derrick-like tower structure was reparable, and the old mechanical rotation system could be updated with new technology.

A view of Pegasus in photographer Carolyn Brown’s 2003 book, Dallas: Where Dreams Come True.

But time and weather had damaged the porcelain-coated steel signage and neon tubing. New 16-gauge steel panels had to be cut, using the originals as templates.

Only two facilities in the United States were large enough to accommodate baking the emblematic red porcelain onto the new panels; fortunately, both were in Dallas. More than 1,000 feet of new neon tubing was required to trace the familiar outlines as craftsmen and technicians remained faithful to the original.

Red Icon Returns

Oil history preservation efforts were rewarded at midnight on December 31, 1999, when new millennium celebrations welcomed the Mobil Oil Pegasus back to the Dallas skyline.

“You can’t tell the new one from the old one except for the fact that the faces are now red and not rusty,” explained one of the restorers. “We replaced every old piece with a new piece that was exactly the same as it was before.”

The Pegasus sign “is a beloved icon of the city of Dallas,” proclaimed Kay Kallos, public art manager in the Office of Cultural Affairs, which manages its maintenance. Mobil Oil merged with Exxon in 1999, creating ExxonMobil, headquartered in Irving, Texas.

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Recommended Reading: Dallas: Where Dreams Come True (2003); Smithsonian ExxonMobil Historical Collection, 1790-2004 (2014); The Seven Sisters: The great oil companies & the world (1975); Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum (1975);The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1991). 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: “Mobil’s High-Flying Trademark.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-art/high-flying-trademark. Last Updated: March 9, 2026. Original Published Date: March 14, 2010.

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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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