Ohio Oil and Gas

by Jeff A. Spencer, Mark J. Camp

Overview

Forty-five years before the drilling of the famous 1859 Colonel Drake oil well in Pennsylvania, oil was produced and marketed from salt brine wells dug in southeast Ohio. The oil was bottled and sold as a cure-all medicine, Seneca Oil. In 1860, one of the first oil fields in Ohio was discovered approximately 10 miles southeast of these wells. The 1885 discovery of the giant Lima-Indiana oil field set off the oil boom of northwest Ohio, a period of land speculation and rapid oil field development that lasted over 20 years and propelled Ohio into the leading oil-producing state from 1895 to 1903. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil of Cleveland built storage tanks, pipelines, and a refinery near Lima. The Ohio Oil Company, now Marathon Oil, was active in the area and still maintains an office in Findlay. The Bremen oil field was discovered in south-central Ohio in 1907, setting off another oil boom, which included drilling within the city limits.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780738551715
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	02/18/2008
Series:	Images of America Series
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	1,036,546
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

Jeff A. Spencer is a petroleum geologist, oil field historian, and collector of oil field postcards. He has written several papers for the Oil-Industry History journal. Mark J. Camp, a geology professor at the University of Toledo, is the author of three other Arcadia titles.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     6
Introduction     7
The Thorla-McKee Wells and the Southeast Ohio Oil Boom     9
The Northwest Ohio Oil Boom     25
Grand Lake St. Marys Oil Boom     55
The Scio Oil Boom     61
The Bremen and New Straitsville Oil Booms     67
The Morrow County Oil Boom and Other Ohio Oil Views     99
Oil Refining and Marketing     109
Bibliography     127