Museum
Europe to make a business of oil. All were
small scale cottage-industry operations.
There were separate, and initially more suc-
cessful efforts to commercialize natural gas.
The earliest commercial use of natural
gas took place in 1825 in Fredonia, New
York, halfway between Buffalo and Erie,
Pennsylvania. According to the Ameri-
can Oil & Gas Historical Society, gas
was piped to several stores, shops and a
mill from a downtown gas well drilled by
William Hart, who some consider to be
the father of the gas industry. Records at
the New York State Energy Research &
Development Authority show that shallow
gas wells were soon drilled throughout the
Chautauqua County “shale belt.”
The gas was piped to businesses and
street lights in Fredonia at the cost of
$1.50 a year for each light, approximately
$22 today. The gas streetlights became an
attraction for travelers—there was no such
thing as tourists in those days. There were
also more significant aids to navigation.
The first Lake Erie lighthouse illuminated
by gas was built in 1828 at Barcelona, New
York. That original Hart well continued to
flow until 1858, the year Williams dug his
oil well just 200 miles away.
One of the most active, and mercurial,
figures in the early oil business in North
America was Charles Tripp. Originally
from Schenectady, New York, Tripp was
a visionary. As early as 1852 he applied
for a charter for the International Min-
ing & Manufacturing Company to pro-
duce commercial hydrocarbons from the
seeps and gum beds around Oil Springs,
Ontario, according to the Oil Museum of
Canada in Lambton County, Ontario. The
charter was granted by colonial authorities
in 1854; Canada did not gain autonomy
from the United Kingdom until 1867.
“Charles Tripp went to the Cooper
Carriage Factory to buy wagons to haul
the oil,” said Christina Sydorko, educa-
tion and program coordinator at the Oil
Museum. The owner of the wagon firm
was James Miller Williams, who knew the
next big thing when he saw it. The carriage
business was thriving, but the railroad was
coming, and Williams was already alert to
new opportunities.
The groundwork for that opportunity
had been done not by the early natural-gas
businesses, but by entrepreneurs in coal
oil and derivatives for lighting. “The coal-
oil refiners in the 1850s did everything to
create the oil industry except find crude,”
Charles Tripp was one of the most active figures
in the early North American oil business. James Miller Williams is commonly viewed as the
father of the petroleum industry in Canada.
wrote Earle Gray in Ontario’s Petroleum
Legacy: The Birth, Evolution and Challenge
of a Global Industry (Heritage Commu-
nity Foundation, 2008). Gray was editor
of Oilweek magazine, and before that was
the director of public affairs for Canadian
Arctic Gas. He has written eight books
about Canada’s energy industries.
According to Gray, the coal-oil pio-
neers “created a lamp fuel; developed and
improved the technology to produce it from
bituminous materials; built [small] refiner-
ies; gave rise to improved oil lamps; and
created the marketing facilities and market
demand. All that was then needed was a
supply of crude oil, which could greatly cut
the cost of making lamp fuel from solid coal
or bitumen. That was the missing link first
supplied by James Miller Williams.”
Tripp had been so close. “He had focused
on asphalt,” said Sydorko. “He did produce
naphtha and kerosene by distillation. Tripp
loved his oil fields, but he was going to lose
them: the carriage company sued Tripp for
monies owed, and by way of settlement
Williams got the land. But Williams was
not rapacious. He was kind to the Tripp
family. They stayed in the picture.”
With plans to dig several oil wells
around the gum beds to determine how
deep they were, Williams first dug a water
well to supply the works. The first was
sunk to a depth of about 14 feet and
cribbed, lined with logs to keep the walls
from slumping.
“The next morning the well had
filled with sour [sulfurous] crude and
salt water,” said Sydorko. “The well was eventually deepened to bedrock at about
40 feel. An article in the Sarnia & Lamb-
ton Observer-Advertiser states that the well
produced five to 100 barrels of oil a day.”
Those were wooden whiskey barrels from
the Hiram Walker distillery, not the stan-
dard 42-gallon barrel used worldwide today.
Originally Williams owned the fields
with his partners in Hamilton, Ontario,
but he bought them out, Sydorko added.
“He formed the J.M. Williams Company
and was successful. He was making money.
Colonel Drake was well aware of what Wil-
liams was doing. Williams had a refinery
on site, and then in Hamilton, an industrial
port city from which he sold worldwide.
We have an advertisement from the Ham-
ilton Daily Spectator advertising machinery
and illuminating oils.” (See page 33.)
In 1861, John Henry Fairbank bought
a small parcel of land from Williams and
established his own company. He was a
surveyor working in the area who was
asked to delineate some oil properties
and caught the bug. The next year he dug
a successful well. Fairbank was another
ex-pat American; he was originally from
Rouses Point, New York.
Fairbank is credited with inventing the
jerker-line system, an array of wooden
rods connected by metal links, all sus-
pended so it could slide back and forth.
The arrangement allows a single steam
engine to pump dozens of wells simulta-
neously. More rustic Rube Goldberg than
steampunk, it worked so well that it was
adopted in the early oilfields of Pennsyl-
vania and then around the world.
www.MoAF.org | Fall 2018 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 31