And four times he who gets his work in fust.”
The great Lima field, spreading over a dozen counties in North-western Ohio, was the star performer of the Buckeye galaxy. Centering in Allen, Hancock, Wood and Seneca, it has grasped big slices of the bordering counties, with a strip of Lucas for good measure. Gas-indications in Hancock, which resulted in a large well at Findlay in 1884, set the ball rolling. Others were drilled forthwith, one on the Kramer farm getting five barrels of oil a day. Findlay and Bowling Green had dipped into the Trenton rock profitably, but nobody thought a huge oil-field at all likely to be encountered. The Strawboard Works at Lima, in Allen county, south-west of Hancock, needed more water and the manager decided to drill for water and gas. The hole was punched through the Trenton rock and pronounced a rank failure for gas. The company exploded a torpedo in the barren rock on April twelfth, 1885. To the astonishment of owners and spectators, the well sent out a stream of oil. It was tubed and pumped fifteen barrels a day. Such was the modest beginning of an oil-district destined to cause a greater stir than Grover Cleveland’s boy-baby or Albert Edward’s green necktie.
There were no flies on Lima that glad day;
Great expectations had the right of way,
For the oil-boom had come, and come to stay.
It was “the old, old story.” The Queen of Sheba doubted the reports of Solomon’s grandeur until she sized up the outfit personally and declared: “The half has not been told.” Outsiders doubted the truth of a paying strike at Lima, and doubted its importance after seeing the well and the contents of the tank. The oil had a sickly tint and an odor that “smelled to heaven.” People sniffed the dreadful aroma and proclaimed the oil good only for fuel. A few Limans thought differently and organized the Citizens’ Gas-Company to help play the game to a finish. Not a cloud of gas, but a forty-barrel pumper, was the result in December. Regardless of tint or odor, outsiders and insiders hastened to get drilling-sites. By May first, 1886, sixteen wells on town-lots were producing nicely. George P. Waldorf and James B. Townsend, residents of Lima, were the first to lease a farm in the neighborhood, at one-eighth royalty. They visited Bradford, returned with David Kirk and Isaac E. Dean, formed the Trenton-Rock Oil-Company, leased many lots and fifty-thousand acres of land, set strings of tools boring and soon piled up a tidy production. The year closed with two-hundred wells doing nine-thousand barrels, which the Buckeye Pipe-Line transported and stored. Operations extended north-east and south-west, until thirty-thousand wells were drilled and a half-million acres of territory opened. Findlay, Lima, Fostoria and Toledo were strictly in the swim. The deluge of grease swelled to mammoth proportions. Iron-tanks stored thirty-million barrels, while iron-pipes bore other millions east and west. Refineries used what they could, Ohio oil netting a smaller percentage of kerosene than Pennsylvania crude, and in 1889 the price crawled down to fifteen cents. Think of it—fifteen cents for forty-two gallons of oil pumped from twelve-hundred feet beneath the earth’s surface!
LIMA OIL-FIELDS.
Developments covered large areas in Hancock and Wood counties, took in a strip of Allen and Auglaize one to three miles wide, and extended south-west to St. Mary’s, thirty miles from Lima. They reached north-east into Sandusky and Ottawa, east into Seneca, north into Lucas and west into Van Wert and across the state-line into Indiana. Wood county stood at the top of the heap, with the rest as offshoots. Its first well, drilled three miles north of North Baltimore by T. J. Vandergrift & Co., cantered off in March, 1888, at four-hundred barrels. The second, put down three miles east a year later by Bowling-Green tenderfeet, rated as a fifteen-hundred barreler. Smith & Zeigler’s, on the adjoining farm, outdid this three to one by bowling out five-thousand barrels per diem. The plot thickened very rapidly. Gushers tumbled into line at a dizzy pace. Cygnet lots boasted clusters of derricks that marked king-pin strikes. Agents of the Standard bought thousands of wells and the cream of the territory. The product fed a myriad furnace-fires in Chicago and the half-mile battery of steam-boilers at the Columbian Exposition. In Sandusky county, whose earliest wells, at Gibsonburg in 1888, were by no means aggressive, T. E. Kirkbride called the turn on a six-thousand-barrel spouter in November, 1894. Altogether the Ohio oil-region, with its eastern pool in Trumbull county, its south-eastern branch in Washington, Monroe and Noble and its vast deposit of gas and petroleum in the north-western section, was a startling revelation. But all the territory was not velvet, as eight-thousand dry-holes attest. No leopard could be more spotted. The present average yield of the wells is under four barrels, with sixty-six cents as the average price last year. Five-sixths of the twenty-four-million barrels Ohio produced in 1896 must be credited to the north-western colossus.
Thomas E. Kirkbride, the man that owned the well that raised the smell that set the pace that led the race that broke the slate that it was fate that Coxey’s state should elevate, hails from Tidioute, where his parents located in 1866. He started in oil young, operated in the Warren and Bradford fields, caught the Ohio fever and landed at Findlay in 1890. His first ventures were around Gibsonburg, four miles west of which, on the Jones farm, he drilled the gusher that smashed the Lima record and fattened his bank-account six figures.