- [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by The Ohio Humanities Council, a state-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by the Marathon Oil Foundation, Incorporated.

(pensive music) - These people are drilling for oil.

We're not in Texas, or Oklahoma, or Alaska.

We're in Northwest Ohio.

Few people know about it, but Ohio now ranks fifth among the 50 states in the number of gas and oil wells drilled annually.

What's more amazing, is that 97% of these wells are producers, not dry holes.

What's unfortunate is that none of these are heavy producers, not like the wells we hear about in the Middle East or Alaska that produce 40,000 barrels a day and more.

Ohio wells average less than two barrels a day.

They are known as stripper wells.

Anything over 10 barrels a day, the national average, is considered heavy production.

There are a lot of people like these people, bringing in low yield wells.

They're not part of any of the large oil and gas companies, they are independent producers and contractors.

They are a lost breed of people who got their start here in Ohio and Pennsylvania during the late 19th century.

They maintain the folk life of the oil and gas booms of yesterday.

They carry on the excitement of the quest, the competition, the rugged individualism, the fraternity, and the delight of treasure hunting.

The hazards and the gambling of wildcatting.

But it's not quite the same today.

- Fire in the hole!

- [Glen] It's still exciting to be a boomer.

- [Man] That's oil.

- But it's not quite the same as the old days.

To get all of the excitement that goes with drilling for oil and gas in Ohio, you've gotta know about the old boom days.

Hello, I'm Glen Colerider.

Let me tell you what it was like in the old days when Ohio pioneered the then new petroleum industry.

And when, for a few years, it reigned supreme as the major oil and gas producing region in the world.

(orchestra music) The oil and gas that we produce now, was created by geological events that took place 500 million years ago.

At that time human life had not yet evolved, and animal life was still in its most primitive stages, mostly microscopic marine organisms and simple invertebrates living in tropical seas.

The earth's surface was still shaping itself.

Places that are now mountains and landlocked planes were then under water.

For a period of about 200 million years erosion and shifting landmasses caused sands and shales to be deposited onto the ocean floors, forming various strata and sedimentary rock.

As the marine organisms and invertebrates died, they too were deposited on the floor of the oceans becoming entrapped in the sedimentary rock.

Pressure, heat, and bacterial action caused these primitive life forms to become globules of petroleum.

Subsequent layers of rock, and shifts in the earth's surface further caused these globules to accumulate in geological structures.

As natural gas separated out of these globules, it migrated to the top of the formation.

Saltwater encroaching from ancient seabeds chased the oil along in the formations.

There, the oil and gas laid for millions of years until we first drilled a hole into the formation.

If the hole reached into the oil bearing sandstone, the pressure from the gas caused the oil to shoot up the hole.

If the hole reached into the gas bearing sand, the gas gushed up out of the well.

If the hole reached into an area beyond the gas and oil, saltwater would enter the well.

Or, nothing, it would be a dry hole.

Before holes were ever drilled, however, there were still seepages of the gas and oil at fractures and faults in the earth's structure.

For centuries these were a curiosity for people.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries travelers and naturalists reported seeing oil and gas seepages near Cuba, New York, in Western Pennsylvania, and along the tributaries of the Ohio river.

In 1775, General George Washington found natural gas bubbling out of a spring on his property, along the Kanawha River, in Western Virginia.

Igniting the gas, the spring appeared to be on fire, and he deeded the burning spring to the public as a natural curiosity.

But before the geological theories of Charles Lyle, and the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, people were not likely to understand this phenomenon.

Instead, they tended to think of them as somehow related to the underworld of Hades, as the fuel that fired the flames of hell.

The Seneca Indians treated the oil as medicine, rubbing it on their bodies and drinking it on occasion.

Seeing this, some enterprising Yankees bottled the stuff and pedaled it around the country as a patent medicine.

Others found that the oil made a good lubricant, superior to the animal fats then in use.

But most people treated the seeping oil and gas as a nuisance, for the oil was polluting rivers and wells, and the gas was lethal to breathe, and dangerous to have around.

The oil and gas became particularly bothersome when people started drilling into salt lakes to obtain a more plentiful supply of salt brine.

Often they struck oil instead, and had to abandon the well when the oil ran uncontrollably out of the cisterns and flowed into nearby ditches and streams.

This happened so often along the Kanawha River in West Virginia, that the stream became known as Old Greasy to local boaters.

Sometimes the spills would catch on fire and the stream would become a river of fire all the way to the Ohio River.

It is not surprising then, that people didn't think that much good could come from oil and gas.

Until they started to look upon them as potential sources for illumination.

In 1815, for example, the artist Rembrandt Peale lighted his studio and museum with natural gas.

But the real interest didn't occur until the 1850s, when the increasing scarcity and price of whale oil drove people to look for other sources of illuminating oil.

Abraham Gesner, a Nova Scotian, had already distilled an illuminating oil from coal, calling it kerosene, Greek for wax oil, which prompted Samuel Kier, who was peddling petroleum as a medicine, to try to distill coal oil from petroleum.

Successful, he created a demand for petroleum, and the rush was on to find oil in substantial enough quantities to supply the growing kerosene industry.

Most of the excitement took place here along the Oil Creek, near Titusville, Pennsylvania, when Colonel Edwin L Drake, on August 27th, 1859, struck an abundant source of oil.

This place was easy enough to get to, so that within days the place was overflowing with people ready to get into the game.

A lot of the oil was so near the surface that it didn't take much of a drilling apparatus to get to it.

Many of the first wells were simply kicked down using this spring poll method.

You attached a heavy bit here, lowered it into the well, and put your foot in the stirrup, and then stomp.

(machine squeaking) And the weight of the bit would chip a bit of the rock out.

Two men repeating this all day long could make about three feet of hole a day, taking about a month to get down to the petroleum bearing sandstone.

If you had more money and less energy, you would use a cable drilling rig, similar to the one captain Billy Smith used to drill Drake's well.

This was the same apparatus that the salt well drillers had developed over the past 50 years.

It involved a boiler to make steam, a steam engine to drive the drilling tools through this wheel and pitman, a derrick, high enough and strong enough to lift a 2000 pound string of tools up out of the hole and swing them to one side.

At the bottom of the tools, is a bit.

Then the jars, which permit the bit to be jerked back out of the rock.

Then a swivel, then the screw, which allows the string to be lengthened inch by inch, as the hole is pounded out.

A cable driller is called a rope choker, because he stands here continuously feeling the impact, the slack in the rope, and other signs of the progress of the drilling.

- [Max Shaffer] The driller himself used to be king.

All he would do is stand up with his hand on the rope, and feeling that bit, because he didn't dare to feed it in too fast.

He had 1100 or 1200 or 1300 feet of rope or cable, and he might throw it into a knot down there.

And he was the king of the well.

He was a very outstanding man.

- When about five feet of hole is made, the tools are pulled up out of the well, and this bailing device is lowered in to remove the cuttings.

They are carefully examined to determine which layer of rock you have drilled into.

If you are wildcatting, drilling an exploratory well in unknown country, you would close the rig off to outsiders when you got near the pay sand, as the oil bearing sandstone or limestone is called.

If you found oil, you wanna keep the well a mystery until you have a chance to secure leases on the surrounding properties.

There are always spy and scouts around trying to find out what you're up to, and you need to keep them out however you can.

Otherwise, the work of drilling by cable was pretty routine.

The driller and his tool dresser worked as a team on a 12 hour shift, called a tower, six days a week, sometimes seven, until the job was finished.

On the last day, the driller would show up with a new set of clothes, take off his old ones and throw them in the cellar of the well, collect his pay and go off to hang one on.

♪ The lawyers, doctors, hatters, clerks ♪ ♪ Industrious and lazy ♪ And put their money all in stock ♪ ♪ In fact have gone oil crazy ♪ They'd better stick to briefs and pills ♪ ♪ Hot irons, ink, and pen ♪ Or they will kick the bucket ♪ From oil on the brain (upbeat piano music) The drilling, however, was only part of the excitement.

The rest of the excitement was created by the hundreds of Teamsters that were needed to move equipment of production.

The tank builders, the rig builders, the barrel makers, the barge operators, the railroads and trains of tank cars, the pipeline crews, the hotels and boarding houses, along with sporting houses, saloons and brothels.

Land speculators, lease hounds, stockbrokers, gamblers, as well as the usual merchants and business people needed to supply all of these boomers.

All of this taking place with no seeming sense of direction or control.

Certainly without any civil government, churches, schools, or family life to give it a modicum of civilization.

And happening so fast, the towns hardly had a chance to get started.

And when they did get started, they exploded into being, as Pit Hole did, growing from nothing to 15,000 inhabitants within three months.

Young John D. Rockefeller, in 1862, visited these oil fields to look over the prospects of getting into oil business, and decided that the producing end of the industry was no place for an orderly, Baptist, Sunday school teaching businessman to make a living.

He went back to Cleveland and began the associations that led to forming the Standard Oil Company.

Intent upon putting order, at least, into the refining and marketing end of the business.

And intent upon creating a standard of quality for kerosene in an industry that was becoming notorious for poor and dangerous refining.

The Pennsylvania oil and gas fields continued in a chaos of excitement, free of any attempts to monopolize and control the production.

♪ There's various kinds of oil afloat ♪ ♪ Cod liver, caster, sweet ♪ Which tend to make a sick man well ♪ ♪ And set him on his feet.

♪ But ours a curious feat performed ♪ ♪ We just a well obtained ♪ And set the people crazy ♪ With oil on the brain In the mid 1880s, when the oil and gas fields began to dry up here in Pennsylvania, all of this excitement moved to Northwest Ohio.

At first as a natural gas boom centered in Findlay, Ohio.

From the time of its first settlement in the 1830s, residents of Findlay had been plagued with natural gas seepages, especially in their water wells.

Some put a cover on their sulfur wells to let the gas accumulate, then piped it into the house to burn it for light or heat.

But too often, the seepages caused accidents.

Jesse George had a well of what he called, "burning water", here on the corner.

He tried to keep it nailed shut, but the kids kept opening it to ignite it.

And one day, two boys almost blew themselves to death, and Jesse had the well filled in.

In the 1860s, with the Pennsylvania boom in mind, several local citizens formed an oil company and went prospecting for oil around these natural gas seepages.

But either they didn't drill deep enough, or in the right place, to get anything of commercial quantity.

Nevertheless, Dr. Charles Oesterlen, a German educated physician who had come to Findlay in the 1830s, decided he would make a study of these gas seepages, mostly for purely scientific reasons.

He studied scholarly books on geology and took field trips in and around Findlay and Hancock County to study rock formations.

In the 1870s, while serving as Findlay State Representative in the Ohio General Assembly, he studied geology at Ohio State University, and discussed the seepages with his professors, including Dr. Edwin Orton, the state geologist.

Despite Orton's pronouncement that no gas or oil could exist in the Trenton limestone, the only logical petroleum bearing sand to be found in Northwestern Ohio, Oesterlen came away convinced that there must be an immense volume of gas trapped below the upper strata of limestone to cause the gas to seep through the cracks and the porous rock.

Until 1884, however, he couldn't find anyone to back his idea of drilling down to the Trenton limestone to tap his theoretical gas reservoir.

But when gas was discovered by drilling in nearby Bucyrus, local investors became more interested, and the Findlay Natural Gas Company was formed by selling stock to local citizens.

In May of 1884, they found a strong pay of gas after digging only eight feet, here on what was then Oesterlen's farm, east of town.

They there upon stopped to lay lines to prospective users of the gas, and they hired a professional driller from Bradford, Pennsylvania who had a lot of experience drilling gas wells.

Activity was quickened on September 19th, when a small earthquake caused the flow in the shallow well to increase dramatically.

(rushing water) Within three weeks, the driller had a derrick and tools in place ready to drill to 2000 feet, if necessary, to explore the gas source.

By November 1st, they had already found gas at three levels, and oil on one.

At 618 feet down, the gas was strong enough to shoot a flame six feet high, when ignited, out of the seven inch casing.

Suddenly stock in the Findlay Natural Gas Company was in great demand and its price roared above par.

Crowds gathered daily to watch the progress, and the cuttings from each screw were examined carefully for clues as to what they were drilling into.

On Sunday November 16th, more than 3000 people came to watch, some from as far as 20 miles away.

To satisfy the crowd, they ran a pipe to the top of the derrick and lit it.

The flambeau could be seen five miles away that night, fueling more excitement and curiosity seekers.

On the third week of November, the driller struck on another large deposit of gas at 1400 feet and the stock prices exploded as speculation became rampant.

Finally, on December 5th, 1884, at 1,648 feet, they shot the well with 30 quarts of nitroglycerin.

(explosion blasting) The resulting blast of gas when ignited could be seen in Bloomdale, 15 miles away, and measured about one half million cubic feet per day.

Sufficient to light and heat every household in the city of Findlay.

Well, without a way to store any additional gas, one would think that this should have been enough gas to satisfy everyone, but immediately, other prospectors wanted to try their luck.

On January 20th, 1885, a little more than a month after the Oesterlen well came in, another gas company shot a well at 1200 feet, and obtained a blast of gas measuring 1 million cubic feet per day, twice the size of the Oesterlen well.

But not to be outdone, the Oesterlen group contracted to drill two more wells.

The first came in at one and one half million cubic feet, and blew the casing out of the well.

The second came in at 2 million cubic feet, shooting a flame when ignited, 50 feet high, causing birds, ducks, geese, and owls to hover around its spectacular light at night.

A light that created a daylight a mile away.

Throughout 1885, six more wells were drilled, each more spectacular than the last.

Until on January 20th, 1886, the city was awakened with a frightening roar, as the monstrous Caldwell came in blowing 50 million cubic feet.

(gas roars) The well was located here on the south bank of the Blanchard River, on a lot occupied by Louis Carr's slaughter house.

At 1,146 feet, the drillers hit such a blast of gas, that they dropped the tools into the well to try to throttle it.

Well, the gas blew the tools up out of the well, and escaped with such ferocity that they did not light it for fear of the damage it would do.

With a roar that could be heard, easily, seven and a half miles away, the gas saturated the city for five days before it could be brought under control.

During that time, not a fire was lit in Findlay.

A 10 foot high standpipe was erected 200 feet away and hooked into the well.

After much publicity, including a parade through town with a band playing, the standpipe was lit.

The flame shot more than 100 feet in the air and cast shadows five miles away.

People in Lima, 33 miles away, claimed they could see it at night.

It was plainly visible 25 miles away in Bowling Green, and in Tiffin, and Bluffton, and Ada.

Farmers outside of Findlay complained that the light kept their chickens awake.

And people in Ottawa, a town nearby, pleaded in a letter to a Findlay newspaper to please turn off the light and go to bed.

For the next several months, the railroads got up excursions from distant towns to come and see the site.

After taking one of these excursions in February, a reporter for the Toledo News Bee exclaimed, "At first, a brilliant light is seen in the heavens, and then a great cloud of fire.

The phenomenon is awful and fearful.

A monster shedding, the light.

A light, which to the unaccustomed eye exceeds anything before imagined, beyond the sun itself.

As we neared the spot, sounds like the rushing waters of a great fall forcibly reminded us of Niagara.

And as I looked at the great cloud of flames shooting upward, as if angry that there was nothing for it to destroy, the feeling of the sublime overwhelmed me.

The scene is one of indescribable grandeur.

Suddenly it was uncomfortably hot, even in middle of winter, and turning away from the monster we noticed on the opposite side of the river, and for a considerable distance all about the well, that grass was growing with the luxuriance of May, and the flowers were blooming, and that the water in the river, all though elsewhere was covered with ice, was here as blue and limpid as a lake in June."

Responding to this amazing abundance of gas, the civic leaders of Findlay decided to boom the town.

To do this, they hired CC Howells, a professional publicity person, who had just successfully boomed Wichita, Kansas as a cattle town.

And he set out to create all of the hoopla of a wild west show, then America's number one kind of entertainment.

First, he had advertisements run all over the country that Findlay was offering free gas to manufacturers who would locate here.

Next, he had 19 arches built across downtown main street, each festooned with blazing gas jets in multicolored glass globes, lighting banners that read, "Findlay, the center of the world".

"Women split no wood in Findlay", and other such braggadocio.

Next, he had three of the largest gas wells piped to the north end, the south end, and the center of town, fitted to 60 foot high standpipes and burned continuously to show off how abundant the gas was, and to make sure the city would never see night.

To entertain prospective industrialists and investors, he had a huge convention hall built on the banks of the Blanchard facing the Caldwell, which he named, The Wigwam.

And to bring all of this to a climax, he put on a three day celebration, complete with marching bands, drill teams, equestrian troops, military outfits, politicians, sports teams, singers, dancers, lecturers, all peppered with 100 gun salutes and similar fanfare.

More than 30,000 people from all over the United States attended the event.

(bright upbeat music) The end results of Howell's hoopla, were 50 new industries locating in Findlay; Including many glass factories, a quadrupling of the population of the town creating an intended real estate and housing boom, and a massive infusion of outside capital into the town.

The citizens of Findlay took this new wealth and plowed it back into the community, building a new courthouse, new school buildings, downtown business blocks, churches, lodges, bridges, paved streets, waterworks, and some truly magnificent homes along West Sandusky Street and South Main Street.

All of this splendor helped the people of Findlay overlook the negative aspects of the boom; The millions of cubic feet of gas wasted daily, just to promote the boom.

And the numerous sets of gas lines running in the street, mostly above ground, leaking and buckling, causing a stench, and a danger of explosion.

The gas people simply flared off the leaks so that the streets looked like they were ablaze.

Then there were the saloons, the fighting and the thieving, the houses of prostitution that made a police department necessary for the first time.

But Findlay absorbed all this and became an industrial town.

Not so with other small towns in Northwest Ohio that attempted to mimic Findlay's boom.

Places like Bowling Green, North Baltimore, Baird's town and Bloomdale, that were all within the newly discovered gas field.

Perhaps they were not large enough to begin with, being only small farming villages, not really interested in industrializing.

More probably, they simply didn't boom themselves hard enough or professionally enough.

Their booms lacked the sense of direction and control that Howells gave to the Findlay boom.

What they did have in common with Findlay, however, was that they believed the gas supply was infinite and inexhaustible.

In 1888, a Bowling Green newspaper proclaimed that Bowling Green had enough gas to fuel all of the factories of the world.

In the same year, when a North Baltimore newspaper reported that the state geologist, Edwin Orton, had predicted that the gas in Northwest Ohio would not last another 10 years, the editor claimed the news was met with delight because nearly everything the professor has prophesied has turned out vice versa.

But within only three years, the glass factories in Bowling Green and North Baltimore had to close down for a lack of fuel.

The gas boom was over.

- [Melissa] As soon as the natural gas was available, my brother had it installed in the house.

It was wild uncontrollable, with no gas regulations to control it.

He piped it into our cookstove and the first time he lit it, the lids blew off the top of the stove.

I told Henry I wouldn't use it, he must take it out.

"Oh shucks," he said, "You're old style, you'll get used to it.

It won't hurt you."

- [Emery] We have gas in our homes and had gas lights.

It was five outside gas lights connected to our lines.

And we had three homes with it, and run two engines.

I guess if we'd had a way of making products out of our gas, like they have now, we'd have made an awful lot of money out of our gas.

We had oceans of gas.

- The oil boom in Ohio began in 1885, one year after the gas boom began, but it lasted much longer.

It also had a radically different character.

It began when Benjamin Faurot, a Lima businessman, took one of those railroad excursions to Findlay to see the sites.

Not wanting the rival town to get the better of Lima, he came home and announced, "If Findlay can get gas, so can we."

He there upon got together some investors, hired a Pennsylvania driller, and set off to drill for gas or water to supply his straw board paper mill.

In May of 1885, drilling into the Trenton, he hit oil instead.

When shot with nitroglycerin, the well flowed 200 barrels of oil a day for a brief time.

To make sure Faurot's well was not a fluke, other citizens of Lima got together another company to prospect for gas.

It too produced oil, and in greater quantities than Faurot's.

Meanwhile, Faurot gave up the straw board paper business, and with fellow investors, started the Trenton Rock Oil Company to prospect for oil.

And the oil boom was on.

♪ I once was unknown by the happy and gay ♪ ♪ And the friends that I sought did all turn away ♪ ♪ Our doweling was plain and simple, our fair ♪ ♪ And nothing inviting, of course, could be there ♪ ♪ But now what a change, our houses so grand ♪ ♪ Not one is as fine throughout the whole land ♪ ♪ And we can now live in the very best style ♪ ♪ And it's simply because, my pa has struck oil ♪ By 1886, the company had drilled 250 wells, from Lima Southwest through St. Mary's and into Indian, producing a plentiful supply of crude.

The problem was, however, that no one wanted it.

It was radically different from Pennsylvania crude.

It smelled horrible, still does, bad enough to stop a clock.

And became known as skunk oil or sour crude, to characterize its sulfurous nature.

When refined, the crude produced a yellowish kerosene, not the water white kind produced from Pennsylvania crude.

And when burned, it smelled like rotten eggs, gave off less light, and left a sulfurous crust on the wick that ruined its effectiveness.

The Standard Oil Company, which by this time monopolized the refining of crude oil, didn't know what to do with the Lima crude, because the crude couldn't be refined into illuminating oil that met the standard it had set for its kerosene.

At the same time, it couldn't afford not to buy the Lima crude for fear of losing its monopoly in the refining business.

On John D. Rockefeller's advice, Standard's board of directors decided to buy the crude and store it until the company could find a way to refine it into an acceptable product.

They there upon created a subsidiary, The Buckeye Pipeline Company, to build the pipelines and storage tanks, and reduce the price they would pay for the crude from sixty two and a half cents a barrel to $0.40, to discourage production.

Then late in 1886 and early 1887, the great gushing wells of Southern Wood County started coming in.

First, the Fulton well just north of North Baltimore, flowing 500 barrels a day.

Then two months later, the Hemmingwell, flowing 2000 barrels a day.

Then five months later, the Slaughterbeck well flowing 5,000 barrels.

Until in September 1887, the Ducky, the Potter and the Foltz came in, all gushing more than 10,000 barrels a day each.

(bright upbeat music) In response to the deluge, Standard reduced its price to $0.15 a barrel, but still the excitement mounted.

Because even at $0.15 a barrel, these wells could produce $1500 a day, and it only costs $1200 to drill the well.

The producers down around Lima, however, didn't fare so well on $0.15 oil, for their wells tended to produce 50 to 100 barrels per day, $15 worth at best.

Believing that their oil had an intrinsic value greater than $0.15, 14 independent Lima producers formed a combine, the Ohio Oil Company, trading their wells and leases for stock in the company, and took their production off the market until Standard would pay at least $0.40 a barrel for their crude.

Meanwhile, Standard took even more aggressive steps to deal with the excitement; First, it increased its efforts to find a way to refine the crude, by hiring Herman Frasch, a highly inventive Canadian scientist, to work with JW Van Dyke, its own chief refining specialist, building them a special refinery at Lima, named The Solar Refining Company, in which to work out the problem.

It then redoubled its storage and pipeline efforts, creating the Cygnet Pipeline Company, and The Connecting Pipeline Company, to handle the gushing Wood County crude.

And then it employed more devious methods to absorb the crude.

Here in Galatea, just east of North Baltimore, it created a secret refinery named the Manhattan Oil Company.

The refinery itself wasn't much of a secret, for it occupied 60 acres of land here containing dozens of buildings, two large reservoirs, numerous railroad sidings with its own tank cars, and employed over 600 workers who lived in a once thriving town here.

What was secret about it was that Standard Oil owned it.

Well, the stock of the company was owned by an English syndicate, whose stock in turn was owned by Standard Oil executives, so that no one could trace the ownership back to Standard.

The purpose of the refinery was to refine an inferior grade of kerosine from the Lima crude, and then market it under Manhattan Oil's name, thus absolving Standard of producing a sub-standard oil.

But even this trick wasn't enough to absorb the supply of crude that Standard was being forced to buy, to maintain its monopoly of the industry.

Finally, John D Rockefeller proposed that Standard do what he had always said it should never do, go into the production end of the industry to calm the excitement and to stabilize the situation.

The plan was to buy up all of the leases and producing wells, and then to take the field out of production until Standard's scientists could find a way to refine the crude into an acceptable kerosene.

Because resistance to selling out to Standard was so high, the plan had to be executed in secret.

First, by having its subsidiaries, like Buckeye Pipeline, quietly start buying up leases and wells.

And by using its bogus company, the Manhattan Oil Company, to make it look like there was competition.

Then by using fictional names to secure leases, or simply by using Standard's employee's names, or by using aliases.

Despite the secrecy, the word quickly got out that Standard was buying up everything in sight, so that when a North Baltimore newspaper reported that the moon hadn't been out for several days, the editor concluded that Standard must have swallowed it up.

These suspicions were confirmed, when in 1889, Standard bought the Ohio Oil Company, its only real competitor in the production end of the Lima-Indiana field.

Standard now owned 75% of the field and was ready to shut it down.

Then two things happened that ruined Rockefeller's plan; First, standard scientists, Frasch and Van Dyke, perfected the sweetening stills necessary to refine Lime crude into an acceptable quality kerosene.

There was no need now to shut down the field, except perhaps to gain time while standard built its huge new refinery at Whiting, Indiana near Chicago, based on the new technology, and remodel the solar refinery in Lima to accommodate the new process.

A second happening, however, made a shut down wholly impossible.

In 1889, the Pennsylvania Supreme court ruled that the old common law of mineral rights was not applicable in the case of gas and oil rights.

Instead, the common law of hunting rights applied.

The old law of mineral rights held that a property owner had a right to all of the minerals beneath his property, all the way to the middle of the earth.

The problem with gas and oil, however, was that they migrated under the ground, moving from one property owner's territory to another's.

This problem was compounded by drilling because it became possible for one property owner to drain the gas and oil from beneath the neighbor's land.

Yet it was impossible to identify the gas and oil as the neighbor's property.

The court solved the problem by invoking the law of capture.

The common law principle that migratory wildlife belongs to the person who can capture the game on his or her property.

This meant that you did not own the gas or oil that was beneath your property until you brought it to the surface and captured it.

If your neighbor could drill a hole and capture it on his property, it was his.

Well, suddenly all of Standard Oil's leases became only hunting licenses, not rights to minerals.

And if it tried to control production by shutting down its 75% of the field, the independent producers who own the other 25% could legally pump the field dry.

Thus just to maintain its 75% control Standard would have to drill faster and pump faster than anyone else, and then refine faster and sell faster than it ever did before, just to get rid of the production.

(machinery clunking) The excitement that this kind of dog-eat-dog competition caused in the Lima-Indiana field, made this boom one of the greatest shows on earth over the next decade.

(steam whistle howling) (bright upbeat music) No one bothered with geology.

Instead, everyone practiced close-ology, which meant getting a well down as close as you could to a known producing well, then trying to pump the oil out faster than the neighboring well.

Thus, when you obtained a lease, you used the first wells that you drilled to offset any existing wells on adjacent leases, putting your well on the property line next to the existing well.

When all of the other wells were offset, you would then continue drilling wells on your perimeter to protect your supply.

Out in the country, this practice caused wells to flourish in what looked like lines in a cross hatch pattern.

But in towns, this caused wells to be stacked almost one on top of another, as the owner of each city lot tried to keep his neighbor from getting his oil.

In towns like Brandner, Prairie Depot, now called Wayne, Cygnet, Hammansburg in North Baltimore, people could walk from one end of town to the other without ever putting a foot on the ground, simply by stepping from derrick to derrick, a trick that came in handy in this muddy country.

And kids found it easy to sneak out of the house at night, by simply climbing out an upstairs window onto a derrick.

When people went wildcatting for oil out into untested country, they couldn't use close-ology to locate wells, they had to resort to more arcane practices, like this old fashioned witch.

But most oil people didn't like witching a well because of the practice's long association with finding water, something the oil prospector didn't wanna find.

Instead, most oil people relied on doodle bugging.

You put the bait in here, oil, gas, gold, coal, whatever you're wanting to find.

And then you carried it across a likely location.

When the bait sensed its counterpart below the surface, it would start to spin.

And you can tell how deep the stuff was from the number of revolutions per minute.

When the doodlebug changed direction, you knew that was where the center of the pool or load was.

And that's where you drilled.

A Doodlebug became the name for any device used to find oil, and there were some dillies.

Most were a version of the proverbial black box that operated on electromagnetic waves, or some other invisible magical powers.

One of these was carted back and forth across the field, and then a lever was pulled, and out came a ticket.

It told you where to drill, how deep down, how many barrels of oil you'd find, and what its specific gravity would be.

Another arcane way to find oil was through dreams or visions.

The custom got its credibility from a happening back in Pennsylvania, when Abraham James went into convulsive fits one day when driving home in a wagon.

And it caused him to leap out of the wagon and run into a nearby pasture where he fell to the ground and drove his finger into the dirt.

When he came to, he told his friends he'd had a vision of a huge oil lake beneath the surface there, and that God had told him to dig it out.

Well, they laughed at crazy James until he brought in the Great Harmonial well and opened a whole new field.

Thus, when King Ben, a religious fanatic who started a church at Cygnet called The New House of David, called on Mrs. Shinabarger to tell her he had had a vision of angels standing out behind her chicken coop pointing to a place where they ought to drill an oil well.

Mrs. Shinabarger was inclined to believe him, but Mr. Shinabarger was more skeptical.

And he asked king Ben, what kind of clothes the angels were wearing.

And when King Ben said blue overalls, Mr. Shinabarger threw him out of the house saying everyone knew angels didn't wear overalls.

Yet two years later, they found oil on the Shinabarger place, right about where King Ben said the angels were pointing.

Experiences like these made the drillers try to respect the leaseholders' ideas of where to drill the well, no matter how crazy they might be.

But sometimes they just couldn't get to the place the owner picked, especially in the great black swamp that covered Wood County.

Over near Haskins, off Liberty High Road, a farmer picked a location that was inundated with water.

The Teamsters tried to drag the boiler and riggings to it, but got so bogged down that they couldn't move any further forward and they couldn't get back out.

So they unloaded the wagons where they broke down and made a location.

The well came in, opening up the famous Sucker Rod field between Bowling Green and Haskins.

So named because it ran like a string of sucker rods in a narrow straight line.

Ironically, if they had drilled where the farmer wanted them to they would have hit a dry hole, and would have missed opening the field.

This prompted the queer belief that if you ever broke down on route to a location, you ought to start drilling right there, 'cause you were bound to be lucky.

Another queer belief was that you would always hit a gusher if you could somehow get permission to drill in a cemetery.

This happened in the Sugar Grove cemetery, just north of Cygnet when they moved the cemetery so that they could drill a well.

They did the same thing to the Weaver Cemetery up near Galatea, moved it all the way to North Baltimore to make way for a gas well.

The same queer belief became attached to school yards and church yards, any place where custom and propriety would tell you not to drill.

Thus down in Auglaize and Mercer counties, when they ran out of land to drill on, they talked the state into selling leases in grand lake St. Mary's, every acre of the eight mile long by three mile wide lake was drilled for oil.

Although the independent producers were the ones who promoted these anti geological ideas most, even James S. Donnell whom Standard picked to run the Ohio oil company, tended to discount geology as a means of finding oil.

Formerly an independent drilling contractor himself.

Donnell was known as a man who could smell oil in the ground.

Even when Ohio oil had a large, highly educated geology department to pick out likely fields, Donnell was known to have a location witched just to be sure or to have the driller and give the toolie a silver dollar, blindfold him, spin him around three times, and have him throw the silver dollar and then drill where the dollar landed.

Donnell knew that geology can tell you generally where a structure is, where you might find oil, but someone still has to say drill here and not over there.

And that choice is still almost all chance.

Many of the wells in the Lima Indiana field were flowing wells, meaning they produced oil of their own accord, without pumping.

When one of these wells came in crowds would gather to see the sites and to shout.

It was common to see the tools dancing in the well from the pressure being released below, and the walking beam running away as its load was removed.

This was a sign to run; First to the boiler, to put out the fire, and then for your life.

There'd be a tremendous roar, then the monster would be let loose, raining oil on everyone.

- [Flora] I remember the first well, the gusher that came in here and Clarence Potter drilled the well.

And I know it drew people from far and near, you could hear that well roar.

And they couldn't get it shut, and, you know, for the gas.

And you could just... Oh, it was just a fog of gas.

It was just a wonderful well.

It flowed out before they got it shut in to go into the tanks.

It flowed until the men had to put their boots on to wait to do it.

I remember seeing that.

- [Grace] I saw it come in, I don't how long it lasted then.

We had one up here on our place, it flowed for nine days, but then it stopped.

Oh, we were just thrilled with that of course.

(Grace laughs) We thought it'd keep flowing forever, we'd be rich now.

- Lots of wells caught fire in this gushing state, despite all precautions.

In Cygnet for example, a passing train ignited a gushing well causing both the well and the train to explode.

Even after the well stopped gushing, the danger of fire was always imminent, with everything saturated with oil, the grass, the trees, the ground, the houses, the people, their clothes, the entire field was a tinder box, ready to explode and frequently did.

Destroying whole woods, whole towns and scores of people.

Over in Cygnet, 19 people died when the Grant well caught on fire.

One of them was Joe Blinky, the piano player at the European house, the local brothel, who caught on fire and thought he had died and gone to hell.

And he ran around crying to people as he burned, thinking they were in hell too.

He disappeared and they found him dead the next morning, lying in his bed back at the brothel.

When a gushing well caught fire, there was no known way to put it out except to let it burn itself out when the well stopped flowing.

One time, the well drilled itself out.

When the Bradford well caught fire, over east of Winston in Wood County, the tools were still in the hole.

Well, the pressure of the oil gushing up, kept raising them and letting them fall so that the well continued to drill itself.

The next day, it drilled through the oil formation and into saltwater and put itself out.

When these gushers came in flowing 10,000 or more barrels a day, there was usually no way to collect that much oil.

It would take more than 40 of these standard field tanks to catch a single day's production from one of these big wells.

And it didn't make sense to provide storage or pipelines in advance because the well could always be a dry hole.

In which case you would have wasted your money, and looked a little foolish.

So Gushers were allowed to run free until storage facilities were built or until they could be kept off.

When that happened, the fields would be knee deep in oil and the oil would run off into the ditches and rivers.

At best, the flowing well would be directed into an open earthen pit or into a hastily made lake.

When these lakes first appeared in the black swamp portion of the field, migrating ducks, geese and swans became confused and landed in the lakes, and then couldn't get themselves airborne again.

After gathering lines were laid to and huge 36,000 barrel tanks were built to store the oil, these lakes were pumped out and filled in.

The abundant natural gas that flowed with these gushers was separated out and used to fire the boilers of the drills and pumps.

But there was so much of it that most of it was simply flared off.

Every producing well had flambeaus burning day and night, so that the field literally glowed at night.

It was a great show, one that didn't seem to have an ending, just a changing cast of characters, always coming and going.

Let me tell you more about all of this excitement when we continue our look at Ohio's gas and oil booms.

(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by the Ohio Humanities Council, a state-based program of the national endowment for the humanities, and by the Marathon Oil Foundation, Incorporated.