- (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, Inc. (fanfare music) - The oil boom in Ohio reached its height in 1887, when the great gushing wells of southern Wood County came in, flowing 10,000 barrels of oil a day and more.

When a well stopped flowing, or when it didn't flow from the start, it would be shot with nitroglycerin to create a flow, or to "jug out" the well, to prepare it for pumping.

Nitroglycerin is a highly unstable explosive, detonating at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, or upon a 28-pound impact.

And that's, it couldn't be shipped via railroads.

It had to be made in the field, and in factories or glycerin farms.

One of these, owned by the Ohio Torpedo Company, was located over near Bradner, for a while, but it kept blowing up and knocking out all the windows in town.

So the town asked him to move it out a little further, which they did.

And then it blew out all the windows in Risingsun.

Eventually the factory became located in Rollersville.

Making nitroglycerin was a relatively simple process, but dangerous.

It was made in a metal vat, inside of a wooden vat that was packed with ice.

You filled the inner vat with glycerin, then slowly poured in nitric acid and sulfuric acid, stirring carefully all the time.

As the nitroglycerin formed, it floated to the top.

The process generated a lot of heat.

And if you let the mixture get above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, it exploded.

That's why you packed it in ice.

But if the mixture got too cold, not much nitroglycerin formed.

So you were always working close to the limit, to get the most production.

When you were done, you skimmed the nitroglycerin off into these two-gallon cans, and stored them in a glycerin dump.

When nitroglycerin froze, it became even more unstable.

So it had to be kept from freezing while in storage.

No one knows why a glycerin dump west of Cygnet blew up, because there was nothing left of the person taking care of the place, afterwards.

But since it was freezing weather, everyone assumed that the fellow built a fire to keep the nitroglycerin from freezing, and allowed the stuff to get too hot.

Ah, the explosion knocked out all the windows in town, and left a hole in the ground a hundred feet across all the way down to bedrock.

The shooters who handled the nitro were of two different characters.

Either a devil-may-care harum-scarum kind of fellow, who got a kick out of driving the torpedo wagon like hell, or a laid-back, easygoing kind of fellow, who took the whole thing rather casually.

Whichever character they had, they had two things in common: headaches caused by breathing the nitroglycerin, and short lives.

- (Leon Mercer) My Dad went to Bowling Green to pay the taxes.

And when we come home on the Gypsy Lane, fellow went by, and he was laying down in the seat, and a-whistling.

And he had a big load of glycerin, he had a stock wagon, not a shooting wagon.

And he spoke to me when he went by, he had a nice big dapple gray team and a nice trimmed harness.

And he went on up the road, of course, the team was just a-walking.

When the fellow went over the railroad with the stock wagon, and evidently just when his hind wheels went over, is when it blowed up.

It blew the railroad back towards us, and knocked our horse down.

And one of the horseshoes went right through that house.

So there was a house pretty close there, and the woman was getting a meal, and her stove was piled up in the corner, and oh, an awful mess.

And the horseshoe laid in the house on the bed.

Those horses were blown pretty much all to pieces.

The one horse with, you could see his heart, plain.

But the back part of the horses up to about the front leg was blown.

One horse on one side of the road, and one on the other.

I don't think they ever found a piece of that man.

And we went on, and I was the last guy that he ever spoke to, or the last guy he ever saw.

I think.

- As a consequence, when a shooter came onto a well to shoot it, everyone stood back and took orders from him.

He was the boss.

Well shots were gala events, publicized in advance, so that crowds would form to see the show, some people traveling from other towns.

The usual well shot called for 100 to 120 quarts of nitroglycerin.

But some were tried at 500 quarts and even 1000 quarts.

Such blasts usually blew the casing out of the well, and knocked the derrick to splinters in the process.

But the owners didn't seem to mind.

It was good publicity for the well, and it raised the value of the stock.

The nitro was loaded into one of these torpedoes, which was first lowered into the well part-way with a cable hooked to the bailer.

One of these holds 30 quarts.

So to get a really large shot, several torpedoes would be lowered into the well, one on top of another.

The nitro was transported in the wagon in a special padded compartment under the shooter's seat.

When the shooter poured the nitro into the torpedoes, he was always careful to spread some rags around, to catch any drips.

As the story goes, one shooter forgot to do this, and he got some drippings on the bottom of his boots.

And when he went to step away, he got blasted up in the air when his boot hit the floor.

And then he got blasted up again when he landed, and the other boot went off.

When the shooter poured the nitro, he was also careful to make sure the can was absolutely empty before he returned it to the wagon.

Cans with a little nitro in them were much more dangerous to transport than full ones, because the nitro could splash around and explode.

(explosion goes off) Daredevil kids, who knew this, liked to steal empty cans from a wagon and throw them into a field to watch them explode.

The danger gave rise to the expression: an empty can is always loaded.

Before lowering the torpedoes into the well, the shooter always timed the gassings of the well.

Now, all wells gas to an extent, but some let loose a gust of gas at regular intervals, from 20 minutes to an hour apart.

And if the gust was strong enough, it could send the torpedo flying back out of the well.

If this occurred, the shooter had two choices.

Either run for it, in which case the torpedo would shoot out of the well, hit the crown block, explode, and wipe out everything in sight.

Or he could stay there and catch the torpedo as it came back up out of the well.

Now, few people admit to ever having seen a shooter catch a torpedo.

Oh, and probably because no one wanted to stick around to see if he could.

But many shooters claimed they had caught them.

One, a shooter named McCoy, with the Independent Torpedo Company in Findlay, claimed he caught three in a row, holding the second and third in the well with his foot while he poured the first out onto the derrick floor, then doing the same with the second and third.

To avoid this kind of heroics, the shooter timed the well carefully, and lowered the torpedoes only during the intervals between gassings.

Then, to make sure the torpedo stayed down, he packed the well with salt water, or oil, or both.

This also made sure the shot would stay in the well, and not shoot up the hole.

On top of the last torpedo, the shooter attached a dynamite cap, to be triggered by a falling go-devil.

The go-devil was only dropped when there was a breeze in the air to dissipate the gassing afterwards.

Never towards sundown, when the air was heavy.

- (Grover Parr) I never seen one catch on fire, except George Grant's well.

They tell me that the shooter asked Grant to hold off until morning.

And on top of that, they didn't have the fire out on the boiler.

Heard that from hundreds of people (indistinct).

And when the shooter asked Grant to postpone the dropping of the go-devil until morning, he said, "Aw hell, drop it in."

And the glycerin wagon hadn't been taken away.

I forgot to mention that, they didn't take, they didn't give the shooter a chance to take it away.

And then a bunch of volunteers grabbed it when the fire started.

They started running away, and that's what killed most of the people, when that got on fire and blew up.

One man, I saw where he lost his brains.

He was laying there, the whole top of his head blown off.

All I remember was his brain, it was laying on the grass.

When we walked down to the place there, there come a young fellow ahead of me, pushing a bicycle, he run it right through the brains, but they were just like a surgeon had taken them out and carefully laid them there.

And it was two or three of them, ones that hadn't been taken away dead, and they were operating on a man who used to have the barbershop in Cygnet.

And they had him, in where, they, I guess, it must be in the mayor's office or something.

Now they had them in that window, and two doctors, doctor and surgeon, were holding (indistinct) down and operating on his leg.

Piece of steel about that long, a bar, flat bar and about a quarter inch thick.

Went through and broke the bone in the leg, cut a big hole in there, well they had him trying, he could look right into the work job they were doing, from the outside.

- Checking the boiler and other fires to make sure they were out, and then removing the torpedo wagon to a safe distance, the shooter gave the honor of dropping the go-devil to a woman or a young boy, who would then drop it and run like the devil.

(machinery drones faintly) About a minute later, an explosion would be felt.

And about 30 seconds later, the packing would come shooting out of the well, followed by shattered pieces of the Trenton Limestone, and finally gas and oil, if the well was going to flow.

(machinery hums) (water or oil gushes noisily) While the crowd cheered, the kids would run to see if they could find any pieces of the go-devil, considering it a prize to find one reasonably intact.

After being shot, the well might flow for a while, but when it stopped, it would be tubed and put under pump for production.

♪ 'Tis strange what attentions a fortune does bring ♪ ♪ At home or abroad how the friends to one cling; ♪ ♪ And now even strangers are courteous and bland, ♪ ♪ To pay their addresses or take by the hand.

♪ ♪ When before, on a walk, if a neighbor I'd meet, ♪ ♪ Cold was his look and quick his retreat, ♪ ♪ But now in my carriage he greets with a smile, ♪ ♪ And ♪ it's simply because ♪ my Pa has struck oil.

Another good show in the oil boom was to watch the pipeline gang screw the big pipes together using these huge tongs.

The Buckeye and the other Standard-owned pipelines employed large gangs, some as big as 3000 men, living in tent cities, working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, until the job was done.

The pipes were not yet welded together, and screwing them together was a somewhat primitive task.

First, the stabber aligned the pipe threads to the collar.

Then the pipe would be screwed in with a rope until the turning became difficult.

Then the pipe would be turned by the tongs, with each successive tong gang hooking on after a one-twelfth turn of the pipe, pushing down on the tongs with all of their weight, bouncing on them to add momentum.

To synchronize these movements, the gang boss rapped out a rhythm on the pipe so that everyone would bounce the tongs at the same time, accompanying the rapping sometimes with a work song that kept the rhythm going.

(fiddle music, and object clanks rhythmically) If you didn't keep in time with the rest, you would constantly be beating against them, and getting your brains bounced out, as many a greenhorn tong worker found out.

This working together built up a tough-guy fraternity that found its expression in fights and brawls when the pipeliners finally got into town.

When the pipeline was all completed, a go-devil, or pig, as they called it, like this one, was run through the line to flush out any stray rabbits, rodents, twigs, and other debris.

Gib Morgan, one of the folk heroes of the early Ohio oil fields, used to tell of when a boomer wanted to move on to the next boom and couldn't afford the train fare, he'd sometimes hook a ride in a pipeline, ahead of the go-devil.

Gib claimed that when the oil played out in Ohio and Indiana, all of the boomers wanted to go west.

So the Buckeye put the whole lot of them into their line and shot them on through, but they forgot about the fork in the line where it splits, one trunk going to Texas, the other to Oklahoma.

Well, Gib says all of them boomers hit that fork feet-first, one foot going to Texas, the other to Oklahoma, and according to Gib, that's why all the Texas and Oklahoma oil boomers are half-assed.

Another sight in the oil fields was a burning storage tank.

The large ones were made of metal, and being the tallest thing around in a rather flat country, they tended to be struck by lightning a lot, and set ablaze.

When this happened, there was nothing you could do to put it out.

It had to burn itself out, which took several days.

The big danger was in its boiling over and flooding the surrounding area with burning crude, setting other tanks on fire.

The first thing people did then was to run out with shovels and build an earthen dike around the burning tank.

Oddly, it took people a long time to figure out that they ought to do this in advance.

In 1890, the state of Ohio passed a law requiring all storage tanks to be diked.

Another thing that could be done to reduce the danger of boiling over was to pump oil out of the tanks into the trunk lines, to lower the level of oil in the tank.

This would be done until the pumps got so hot, they wouldn't work anymore, or until the trunk lines got so hot, they started to buckle.

Then the only thing left to do was to shoot the tank with a cannon, to let the oil out the bottom.

One time at the Sola refinery in Lima, they shot the tank 14 times before they could get the level to go down.

Another time, the first shot they fired hit a seam in the tank, and the entire tank split in two, sending people flying through the barbed wire fences to the high ground for safety.

Luckily, not very many people were ever burned by these tank fires, but many got red faces from watching them too closely.

The boomers who created all of this excitement tended to live in ramshackle towns that were thrown up quickly to accommodate the influx, with street names like Tarr, Venango, and Bradford, that indicated the Pennsylvania origins of the inhabitants.

Most of them left their families, relatives, or wives, if they had any, back in Pennsylvania, and were thus free of these usually civilizing influences.

They lived in boarding houses and hotels, sharing their rooms and their beds with fellows working on the alternate tower.

What they called the "hot bed system."

Having no real place to call home, they tended to frequent saloons and sporting houses during their off hours.

One fellow wrote down his daily schedule.

10:00 am, get up and sober up.

11:00 am, eat and get to work.

Noon to midnight, work like hell.

Midnight to 3:00 am, get drunk and raise hell.

3:00 am, beat the hell out of them that's got it coming.

4:00 am, go to bed.

When it came time to raise hell, a boomer had lots of choices.

(lively piano music) ♪ My wife and I live all alone ♪ In a little log hut we call our own ♪ ♪ She loves gin and I love rum ♪ I'll tell you what, we've lots of fun ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha, hee hee hee ♪ Little brown jug, don't I love thee ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha, you and me ♪ Little brown jug, don't I love thee ♪ ♪ 'Tis you that makes me wear old clothes ♪ ♪ 'Tis you that makes my friends my foes ♪ ♪ Here you are, so near my nose ♪ ♪ So tip her up, and down she goes ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha, hee hee hee ♪ Little brown jug, don't I love thee ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha, you and me ♪ Little brown jug, don't I love thee ♪ - Cygnet, for example, had a gas-lit racetrack, right in town, that doubled as a baseball field.

Something was going on there both day and night during the season.

And when there wasn't racing, there were always dog fights and cock fights to gamble on, or feats of strength, like finding out who could lift a wagon by its axle.

And if things got dull, you could always shoot off a few dynamite caps in the streets, just to make some noise.

- (Interviewee) This happened over at some place near Cherry Fork.

I'd never been there, but my father mentioned that they had to walk over to one of their locations past the speakeasy in the area.

Now, back then a speakeasy was a wildcat saloon, that was one that didn't have a license.

And the fellow that ran the speakeasy was doing all right, until my father, on one of his visits, tried to show them how high he could kick.

I guess he'd had a little bit too much to drink, and when he started kicking, he kicked down the stove pipe and they set the shack on fire and put the man out of business.

- (Ben Sigworth) I worked in one gang where there was 85 of us, 85 men in the pipe gang.

But they, that was, boy that was a murdering outfit, that.

I don't think they come any tougher.

(chuckles) We'd go into town, and just take charge of the town, when we'd get into town, and why, we'd decide where we's gonna drink, and just take over the place.

- The fighting had a very important place in the boomers' lives.

For as strange as it may seem, it created a kind of fraternity among the men.

No matter how vicious the fighting might be, it always ended up with the opponents being friends, helping one another recover from the pain and the damage done.

- (Walter Hovis) Lots of fighting, and people get to fighting.

If you were to get in and give some man a hell of a good lickin', spoil his face, so that he wouldn't look natural for a year or two, why, he thought that is an honor.

Now they call it a dog fight, and, but there used to be lotsa scrappin' and fightin' for who would be the, the best man in the neighborhood.

If you and I would meet here, and you would be bragging about what a good man you was, and I thought I was a pretty good man, I would say, I think I can handle you pretty well.

Well, the first thing, we'd be at it, to find out which one is the best man.

That was kind of the way the fights were fought, them days.

They wasn't fought because I hate you, and I owe it to you, but they'd get in there and they'd knock theirselves and knock, by that they'd fight and fight, what they'd call, as much as 20, 30 rounds now.

They didn't call them rounds, they just fought till one would give up.

And he was licked.

And, why, they kicked him in the head with that.

They got him down, jumped in their face with boots, with big soles on, cut their face up and kicked 'em in the head till they'd give up.

Whenever they give up, why, then they was good friends again.

And then they'd go someplace to a well, right close by where there's a well drilled, and one of them would pump water for the other one to wash the blood off his face.

That was kind of the history of them.

Maybe not as bad as that sounds, the way I said, but they would have a lot more.

For now, you hardly ever hear of a fight, a country fight.

You don't hardly ever hear of a country fight.

People got more civilized.

- Just as often, the fights would be like a fraternal initiation, where a whole bunch of men would beat up a newcomer or outsider, and then welcome the victim into the group as an equal.

In a culture where a boomer might be in town one day, and gone to another field the next, lasting relationships didn't exist.

And fighting was the boomer's way of establishing his identity and reputation quickly, and without question.

This fighting should not be confused with common criminal behavior.

Although it usually was, by outsiders.

Oh, there was lots of thievery.

In most towns, you could lose your horse blanket and your saddle if you turned your back on them, and sometimes your horse.

You had to hire someone to watch your things for you.

And with only a marshal and a deputy for a police force, and with no banks to keep money in safely, robberies were rather common.

It was up to you to protect yourself and your goods.

And lots of people carried guns to do just that.

In Trombley, a bartender was counting his money after closing, looked up and saw someone watching him.

And without a second thought, picked up his revolver and shot the looker.

What little government these boomtowns had was often designed to maintain the Sodom and Gomorrah aspects, not to quell them.

Towns like Cygnet, Jerry City and Risingsun, or "Raising Hell" as they used to call it, incorporated into villages when the county and township authorities kept closing down their saloons and whorehouses.

By incorporating, the boomers were able to keep the county and township authorities out, and keep the excitement going.

As a gesture to the non-boomer, decent folks in the towns, the marshals regularly rounded up the ladies from Toledo who plied their trade in the local hotels, but they didn't run them out of town.

They only fined them.

And the oil field doves regarded the fines simply as a cost of doing business, like a city tax.

The law never shut them down.

Even if the marshals wanted to put some offenders in jail, there were not any readily available.

In Prairie Depot, they used this affair here to hold unruly people.

(hammer clanks) Other towns just chained offenders to a tree.

The person usually just needed to sober up, and that was as good a way as any.

People here used to say that everyone came from the east except the Christians.

The Christians being the locals, the non-boomers, who ran the stores and other services in the boomtowns.

Operated the boarding house, worked at the pipeline station, the refineries and other local manufacturies.

Being local, these people tended to have families around, to be married and settled down.

They joined lodges, went to church, held dances, played in bands, and did the kinds of things most people did in small towns in America during the late 19th century.

The difference was the excitement caused by the boomers.

People were coming and going day and night, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The place never quieted down or closed up.

The boom brought progress to these hamlets, improvements you would only expect to see in big cities, like telephones, telegraphs, electricity, and street cars.

They brought major league players to play on their baseball teams, and major shows and performers to their opera houses.

So that even the Christians had quite a time during the boom.

(lively old-fashioned piano music) (orchestra joins in) Perhaps the least rousing place to be during the boom was living on a lease.

But even this kind of life had its own kind of excitement.

The pumpers and roustabouts, who maintained production after the wells were drilled, were usually company men, working for Ohio Oil Company or one of the other producers.

Usually married and settled down.

Working on a lease was like farming, but worse.

You lived where you worked, but you couldn't just do your chores and leave.

You had to stay on the job 24 hours a day, seven days a week, making sure that the wells were always producing.

It was an isolated existence.

You seldom got to go into town or visit with your neighbors.

If you had any.

The leases were spread out across the countryside on 40-acre tracts, laid out like town lots, so that all of southern Wood County was like a single diffuse town.

There were so called towns at almost every crossroads: Bays, Plaza, Mungen, Ted, Six Points, and others.

But these were really only post offices, slab shacks only large enough for two or three people to stand in, where people came to pick up and drop off their mail.

Along with the post office would be a store or two, maybe a school or a church.

But the sense was one of the entire area being one community, with the oil houses strung out for miles, and only a narrow one-board walk to get from one place to another, the roads usually being too muddy to traverse.

When wells were put under the pump, they would be tubed and packed, with a working barrel at the bottom, and sucker rods leading to the surface, where a jack moved the apparatus up and down, pumping the oil out.

At first, individual steam engines were used to activate the jacks, with the steam supplied from a central boiler house through steam box lines, insulated with straw and manure.

For the people living in the swamp, walking on these steam box lines became the preferred way to get around, particularly in the winter.

And it was nice to have the convenience of having hot water nearby, especially the soft water that distilled out of the lines.

The later method of pumping involved a natural gas powered engine in a central engine house, with shackle rods running to the various jacks in the field.

(oil pump operates) Rigging these shackle rods tested one's ingenuity.

Rube Goldberg would have been delighted with many of the results.

And they needed a lot of attention, oiling them to keep them moving freely, fixing them when they stuck, digging them out of snow drifts in the winter, keeping the grass from tangling them in the summer.

(oil pumps operate) (machinery operates noisily) The engine works mostly from the momentum of the flywheel.

A governor controls the intake valve, so that it opens and closes only when the speed falls below a certain number of revolutions.

(machinery clanks and hums) - (Clair Clemans) Bessemer was the name of the gas engines they used back in the 1880s, 1890s, and the turn of the century.

They were almost always hard, extremely hard to start.

My father and I, in trying to start one, he would get on one wheel, and I would get on the other one.

And we would tramp them to get them started.

When they did kick in, you had to be very, very careful, or they could throw you through the roof.

Now, one thing that I know is a fact, a pumper by the name of Phil Rohner tramped this damn engine until he got tired, mad, and frustrated, and could not get the thing started.

They said that he pulled out his revolver and shot the damn thing.

- Each engine had its own distinctive barker, so that a pumper could keep tabs on several engines at once, just by listening.

(engine barkers make rhythmic sounds) People who lived on a lease remember most, trying to go to sleep at night to these sounds.

And how strange it seemed when someone died, for it was accustomed for a pumper to go around the field and tie back the barkers to announce the death.

The uneasy quiet in the field must have expressed the people's mourning more loudly than any tolling bell.

(machinery squeaks) The women who lived on leases led a less isolated existence because they had more freedom to participate in activities outside the home than their husbands did.

Some ran boarding houses, but most had to make a home out of the slab shacks that were hastily thrown up, slanted five degrees into the wind, so that they wouldn't blow down.

Many belonged to clubs and societies that took on the burdens of caring for the sick and injured in the absence of hospitals.

They participated in the missionary work of the church, helped organize socials and debates at the schools, and raised children.

Their life was made easier by the presence of natural gas on the lease for lights, heating and cooking, but they worked harder, handling farm work and replacing the men in the field when they needed time off or were ill. More than the men, they, together with the elderly and the children, were free to take one of the excursions to see the sights, the well fires, the well shots, the tank fires, the nitroglycerin explosions, in wagons fixed up with spring seats for just this purpose.

Or on the newly installed inter-urban train service.

Despite the isolation and the hard work, these people felt independent and happy, partly because of the high wages, job security and pensions the oil companies gave them, at a time when the country was experiencing depressions and panic, but mostly because they felt they were part of the boom, part of the excitement.

Well, from all of this, one would think that the most exciting thing in the boom would be getting rich overnight, when oil was struck on your property.

Stories after stories have been told about the kid running excitedly into school, shouting, "I don't have to go to school anymore!

Dad struck oil!"

Or the farmer telling the housewife, "This is the last milk I'll be bringing you, ma'am.

We've struck oil."

But that's about where the excitement ended.

♪ I once was unknown by the happy and gay, ♪ ♪ And the friends that I sought did all turn away, ♪ ♪ Our dwelling was plain, and simple our fare, ♪ ♪ And nothing inviting, of course, could be there, ♪ ♪ But now what a change, our house is so grand, ♪ ♪ Not one is so 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.

- Some of the landowners who got rich overnight took their money and moved away to towns like Bowling Green, Findlay, Lima, and St. Marys, where they built huge homes and invested in elegant businesses like hotels and theaters, and settled down to become business and civic leaders.

- (John Gribben) Nigger Carter.

He was a colored gentlemen, mighty nice fella, and got a wonderful well on him.

And he moved to Fostoria, he got him a 10-gallon hat, he got him a gold-headed cane.

The knob was about that big.

And he'd meet my father or I.

Then on the road, after he got that well, he never seen us.

And before that, why, oh land, he was as sociable as anybody could be, but he didn't need it.

He was getting, all he had to do was just reach his hand out, and he got the money, see?

- And some of the farmers who got rich overnight couldn't think of anything else to do, so they just bought another farm outside the oil region, and went back to farming as usual.

And some were like Coal Oil Johnny, the unfortunate fellow back in Pennsylvania, who got rich overnight, then ran off around the country, squandering his money on extravagant times, becoming penniless within a year.

♪ When I arrived at manhood, ♪ I embarked in public life, ♪ And found it was a rugged road, ♪ ♪ bestrewn with care and strife.

♪ ♪ I speculated foolishly, ♪ my losses were severe, ♪ But still a tiny little voice ♪ ♪ kept whispering in my ear.

♪ Waste not, want not ♪ is a maxim I would teach, ♪ Let your watchword be dispatch, ♪ ♪ and practice what you preach, ♪ ♪ Do not let your chances ♪ like sunbeams pass you by, ♪ For you never miss the water ♪ till the well runs dry.

(lively piano music) George Grant from Cygnet was something of a Coal Oil Johnny.

After his well exploded and killed a lot of people, he moved out of town and took up religion, spending a lot of money taking pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and promoting the Sunday school movement.

The point here is that most of the people moved away, moved out of the boom, and out of the excitement that was the boom.

The few who remained took their riches and used them to continue the quest for oil, buying up leases, speculating, wildcatting.

Some won, some lost, but it really didn't seem to matter to them.

For they seem to know that the excitement was in the chase, the hunt for the elusive treasure, not the treasure itself.

(engine hums) All of the excitement in the Lima-Indiana field died down in 1901, when the news about Spindletop reached here.

That phenomenal gusher near Beaumont, Texas that came in roaring 100,000 barrels a day.

When further drilling in Texas proved the field, the boomers took off for the new strike, with the same excitement that they had left Pennsylvania for Ohio.

The new gushers glutted the oil market, and the price of crude, which had risen slowly from 15 cents to 42 cents a barrel over the past decade, suddenly plunged to 3 cents a barrel.

At that price, the wells in Ohio could no longer pay their way, and the oil companies shut down and abandoned all but the heavy producers.

By 1903, Ohio no longer held the lead as the top producing state in the country.

Within a decade, the little oil towns out in the country dried up and disappeared.

Today they are just ghosts of towns, if they exist at all.

The oil boom was over.

In the race to get the oil out of the ground, that the law of capture caused, no one really won.

Such rapid and uncontrolled depletion of the oil and gas destroyed the field's pressure before all the oil was taken out.

More than half of it is still down there, with no way yet known of how to get it out.

These old stripper wells are lucky to get a barrel or two a week.

Just a trickle.

Ironically, if John D. Rockefeller had had his way, there would still be oil gushing from this well.

He had no conception of the problem as we understand it today, but he did sense the need for control and direction in the production of oil, that something had to be done to calm down all of the excitement.

Eventually, the legislatures of the western oil producing states recognized this too, and enacted laws that govern the spacing of wells and the amount of oil each well could take, in order to conserve the field's pressure.

Thus, in 1963, when oil was discovered in substantial amounts in a new field here in Morrow County, Ohio, the western independent oil producers who rushed in to drill in the field spaced their wells the customary one well per 40 acres, and kept them spaced at least 440 feet from other wells.

The Ohio independent producers, however, started drilling offset wells on the edge of property lines.

Suddenly the western producers realized that Ohio was still a law-of-capture state.

The boom was on again, as Mount Gilead here was overrun by drillers, producers, seismographic crews, geologists, lease hounds, camp followers, shysters, and speculators, all trying to get in on the excitement, to beat the next fella to the oil.

♪ I looked out one mornin' about a half past eight, ♪ ♪ A drillin' rig is standin' right by my front gate, ♪ ♪ A half a dozen men, just a-standin' around, ♪ ♪ They all began to measure and to hammer and pound.

♪ ♪ Drillin' rig boogie ♪ Welcome, gas and oil ♪ I felt a little shaky when they called it wildcat soil ♪ (country-style guitar plays) ♪ Well the shooter drove up with a big load of shells, ♪ ♪ He put them every one in the bottom of the well ♪ ♪ Was 90 in the shade, but I turned ice cold ♪ ♪ They headed for the woods a-yellin', "Fire in the hole!"

♪ ♪ Drillin' rig boogie ♪ I just stood my ground, ♪ And from now on, boy, they'll find me hangin' round.

♪ - (Ruth Dairymple) We sold newspapers all over the country.

We sold more newspapers in Texas than we did here in Mount Gilead.

Everyone wanted to read about what was going on here in the oil fields.

And then they came swarming into town.

You couldn't walk on the sidewalks, they were so crowded.

You had to walk in the streets.

Those were exciting times.

Oh my, yes.

Those were exciting times.

- Natural gas was still cheap then.

So no one tried to sell it or conserve it, it was just flared off.

New wells were drilled as close to known wells as possible.

And derricks arose on city lots.

When the city council of Cardington tried to stop this practice, it received protests from 300 citizens.

Everybody wanted a well.

Here in Edison, they lifted home plate on the school playground, and sunk a well.

And when that came in, they sunk two more in the school yard, and several more out there.

(banjo music) They drilled in church yards.

And when people balked at allowing them to drill in cemeteries, they used rotary drills and slant-drilled down underneath the cemetery.

Some people claimed that they even slant-drilled into known producing wells, and two producers demanded the right to drill in the Delaware Reservoir.

It was the same boom as before, even to having the streets filled with mud, brought in on the wheels of the four-wheel-drive trucks and field vehicles.

And well fires, tank fires, and gas explosions.

The city and county governing officials found the situation impossible to control.

Finally, after the governor of Oklahoma suggested to the governor of Ohio that he do something about it, and the Secretary of the Interior demanded that the state legislature do something about it, emergency legislation was passed to put some control over the runaway excitement.

On March 9th, 1964, the new law went into effect, requiring no more than one well per 10 acres, at least 660 feet between wells, and 200 feet from any dwelling, thus eliminating town-lot drilling and close-ology offsetting.

The day before the law was to go into effect, producers tried frantically to get wells started under the old rules, some just driving a pipe into the ground and declaring it was the start of a well.

By October 1965, the boom was over, here, and not so much because of the new spacing laws, but because the boom had depleted the gas pressure, and the field was dead.

Today, they are still drilling for oil and gas in Mount Gilead and in Wood County and throughout the state of Ohio.

It's still exciting to see.

It's still infectious.

It still gets in your blood, but it's not the same as in the old days.

And we're probably better off because it's not.

- (Earle C. Deane) I don't know that I'd be considered a boomer, but I mean that we liked it where it was more exciting.

Big new fields would come in.

We'd go there.

Get sort of tired of this business of watching old pumping wells, greasing up the engines and looking after the stuff.

Gauging the tanks.

We'd rather go where the big doing's going on, gang up there again.

- (Mrs. Stella MacDonald) I went with my parents to see that well.

When it was flowing, it would flow every so often.

And the ground was, ground and trees were all covered with oil.

And we went there on several different occasions to watch that well before they got it shut in, it was a long time.

It just flowed, and would flow every so often, the trees just glistened with oil.

All over the trees.

- (Rollie Myers) And I was there when George Grant shot the well, and I stood, when the well catched on fire, he said that he would shoot, I heard him tell the story, that he would shoot that well at night, he would blow Cygnet up, (indistinct) up.

And I stood right to the side of his wife, and had on a big blouse waist.

And when I was just a kid, and when the well catched on fire, and it scared me, it's a bad (indistinct), so when I was, she grabbed ahold of me, and when I went out of my waist, she had the waist and I was at home without any, my mother stand in the yard and says, where's Rollie.

And I says, "Here I am, Ma."

- (Harold G. Neely) There was another time when a bunch of the oil men in the area went over to Buffalo, New York on a lodge convention.

And they were whooping it up and hollering and drinking and eating, having a big time at this Chinese restaurant that was up on the second floor, and they had a piano player in there, and he had his piano set by a large window, that looked over the whole town of New York, in Buffalo, New York.

These fellows didn't like the tunes the piano player was playing.

So they told him what they wanted to hear, and he refused.

So they felt that the best, next best thing to do was to take the piano away from him, which they did.

And they threw it through the plate-glass window, out into the street.

- (Walter Hovis) Oh God, I used to (indistinct) up on a tank and take a cam and catch a little bit of fresh oil and take a little in my mouth, if I'd had a bad cold or sore throat.

I'd just take it for a...

It's kinda, oh, it ain't bad tasting stuff.

It's not clear.

It's not clean, the stuff.

The stuff, it comes out of the ground, of course.

It's not dirty, it's not unhealthy, but I've tasted it in just that way.

Taken it when I was a kid, pumping on lease, and would catch a cold and have a sore throat.

I would daub some on my neck outside, or on the throat.

And I took a little teaspoon full in my mouth and gargled it, and spit it out.

Maybe a little of it down my throat.

It wouldn't kill it ya, to have it, it wasn't poison.

- (Mary Locke Hurin) I like to recall the happy things, baseball games in the summer and ice cream sodas afterwards, the M&M Club's party in May.

Lilies of the valley, and an orchestra from Cleveland, with the musicians singing the waltzes.

And the party lasted until four in the morning.

A scandalous hour, but coffee was the only beverage.

And in summer, Findlay became the gayest of towns.

Many summer visitors and continuous entertaining.

A visiting girl would hardly ever see her hostess.

There were breakfasts and luncheons and afternoon teas, and hats and lacy gloves.

And at night, picnics or informal dances outdoors.

- (Mrs. George Grant) I can remember when I was a little bit of a girl, almost every train that went south to carry somebody back to Pennsylvania.

And they called it a "milk sickness."

Cygnet was all a swamp, all through here, clear over to Rudolph, and over into...

There was no ditches, no tile, no nothing.

There was never a bit of tile on our farm, could George put down.

So of course, the eastern people couldn't take it.

My mother only lived three years, I think, after we came to Cygnet.

She couldn't stand it.

It was so muddy, and she wouldn't wear rubber boots, so she couldn't go to church.

She couldn't go any places.

She just died, died of a broken heart.

- (Walter Hovis) My God, my God, I've lost my life, by not taking more time off, far away from my work, and going out and going over there to Rudolph, where I would, among the French, it's nice, I liked the people so well, and how I got along with them, my God, my God.

(lively fiddle music) Them French people, when they had an old man living with them, their grandfather or their daddy or anybody would die, why, in the cold weather, they just sat them and lay them in a room.

They'd freeze up, sometimes they'd keep 'em for a week.

He'd freeze up and get as stiff as a board.

And then they'd take 'em out and bury 'em.

And there never was any nicer people, I thought, than the French.

Because they was good to ya, by God, they'd have a dead man in the house where you're boarding.

And they would, they would have a big family.

And that family, you would be boarding there, and that family would have it in them to kid ya.

They was going to play a trick on you, when you come home at midnight at night, they'd go and play a trick on you.

A little woman, their mother, she'd slip around before you went on tower, and they'd tell you, now, if you see any ghosts out, don't you pay no attention.

They're, they're going to gang up, when there's the boys, they is, but she wouldn't want us to tattle after that, it's her own boys, and that was a kind of a joke they had.

Why, they'd get a dead man out on the porch and get him to dance.

- (Max Shaffer) Well, they always claimed they had oil in their blood.

Of course, out here, drilling a well, and the old oil men liked to come around and look it over, and smell the oil, and get the grit on their hands, and wonder how far they're going to drill down, how far they are now.

Well, an oil manager, he's, he's separate from anybody else.

Take a look around, what did you have back in those days, you had shipping, railroads, and so forth, but this was a separate route.

Mysterious.

When I was younger, I remember the men going up into Wyoming and going down into Oklahoma.

Now their grandsons are out there.

There's a bond between 'em.

- (Harold G. Neely) This life is not an easy one.

You are away from home most of the time, you eat in greasy spoon restaurants, and a good night's rest under the barrel of a boiler in the middle of winter, isn't really too hard to take.

I have spent many, many nights sitting up with a drilling well, hoping that we would get a show of some oil or some gas.

I find that the young man who told me the oil business was a pretty good business to get into, knew what he was talking about.

It is a pretty good business.

(fanfare music) (car horn toots faintly) (church bell chimes) (air raid siren blares) (church bells chime) (lively fiddle and banjo 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, Inc.